The consensus protocol is one of the core technologies in blockchain, which plays a crucial role in ensuring the block generation rate, consistency, and safety of the blockchain system. Blockchain systems mainly adopt the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol, which often suffers from slow consensus speed and high communication consumption to prevent Byzantine nodes from disrupting the consensus. In this paper, this paper proposes a new dual-mode consensus protocol based on node identity authentication. It divides the consensus process into two subprotocols: Check_BFT and Fast_BFT. In Check_BFT, the replicas authenticate the primary's identity by monitoring its behaviors. First, assume that the system is in a pessimistic environment, Check_BFT protocol detects whether the current environment is safe and whether the primary is an honest node; Enter the fast consensus stage after confirming the environmental safety, and implement Fast_BFT protocol. It is assumed that there are 3f + 1 nodes in total. If more than 2f + 1 nodes identify that the primary is honest, it will enter the Fast_BFT process. In Fast_BFT, the primary is allowed to handle transactions alone, and the replicas can only receive the messages sent by the primary. The experimental results show that the CF-BFT protocol significantly reduces the communication overhead and improves the throughput and scalability of the consensus protocol. Compared with the SAZyzz protocol, the throughput is increased by 3 times in the best case and 60% in the worst case.
KEYWORDSBlockchain; consensus protocol; dual-mode; Byzantine fault tolerance; distributed system Hence, BFT protocols make different "sacrifices" to prevent attacks, which can result in issues such as low consensus performance and high resource overhead. Proof of Work (PoW) uses computational competition for ledger rights and rewards to prevent malicious behavior and blockchain fork problems, but it results in excessive resource consumption. Proof of Stake (PoS) [15], on the other hand, uses stake competition and "Coin Days" to measure node rights but sacrifices fair competition and decentralization characteristics of the blockchain. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol [16] uses cryptographic technology and mutual voting to maintain consistency, but its communication complexity and high demand have limited its scalability.To solve these issues, this paper presents a dual-mode consensus protocol based on node identity authentication. The protocol divides the consensus process into two subprotocols: Check_BFT and Fast_BFT. By monitoring the behavior of the primary in Check_BFT to verify the primary's identity, the Fast_BFT protocol is initiated if appropriate to allow the primary node to handle transactions alone. The protocol greatly improves consensus efficiency and reduces communication costs without relying on extensive resource consumption, while ensuring consistency and security. The particular contributions of this paper are:• This paper introduces a node identity verification pro...