Synchronous solutions for Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) can tolerate up to minority faults. In this work, we present Sync HotStuff, a surprisingly simple and intuitive synchronous BFT solution that achieves consensus with a latency of 2∆ in the steady state (where ∆ is a synchronous message delay upper bound). In addition, Sync HotStuff ensures safety in a weaker synchronous model in which the synchrony assumption does not have to hold for all replicas all the time. Moreover, Sync HotStuff has optimistic responsiveness, i.e., it advances at network speed when less than one-quarter of the replicas are not responding. Borrowing from practical partially synchronous BFT solutions, Sync HotStuff has a two-phase leader-based structure, and has been fully prototyped under the standard synchrony assumption. When tolerating a single fault, Sync HotStuff achieves a throughput of over 280 Kops/sec under typical network performance, which is comparable to the best known partially synchronous solution.
We present HotStuff, a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for the partially synchronous model. Once network communication becomes synchronous, HotStuff enables a correct leader to drive the protocol to consensus at the pace of actual (vs. maximum) network delay-a property called responsiveness-and with communication complexity that is linear in the number of replicas. To our knowledge, HotStuff is the first partially synchronous BFT replication protocol exhibiting these combined properties. Its simplicity enables it to be further pipelined and simplified into a practical, concise protocol for building large-scale replication services. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software fault tolerance; • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security.
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