Efficient and DoS-resistant Consensus for Permissioned Blockchains

Xusheng Chen, Shixiong Zhao, Ji Qi, Jianyu Jiang, Haoze Song, Cheng Wang, Tsz On Li, T.-H. Hubert Chan, Fengwei Zhang, Xiapu Luo, Sen Wang, Gong Zhang, Heming Cui

Abstract: Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a system runs on a large scale on the Internet, these explicit committee nodes can be easily turned down by denialof- service (DoS) or network partition attacks. Although recent studies proposed scalable BFT protocols that run on a larger number of committee nodes, these protocols' efficiency drops dramatically when only a small number of nodes are attacked.