Efficient-HotStuff: A BFT Blockchain Consensus with Higher Efficiency and Stronger Robustness

Di Zhai, Jian Wang, Jiqiang Liu, Tianhao Liu, Wenjia Niu

Abstract: HotStuff is a state-of-the-art Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus which achieves both linear view change and responsiveness. Furthermore, Fast-HotStuff reduces one round of communication based on HotStuff for lower latency and can avoid forking attacks. However, there are some blocks which have obtained one or two rounds of voting cannot be committed due to attacks by the primary node, thus resulting in a waste of system resources and throughput drops. After analyzing possible attacks in HotStuff and Fast-HotStuff, we propose a new consensus protocol named Efficient-HotStuff, which guarantees that each block which has obtained a round of voting can be committed, hence it is more robust against attacks by the primary node. Our experimental results show that, compared with HotStuff and Fast-HotStuff, Efficient-HotStuff has the highest throughput and the lowest latency without attacks, and Efficient-HotStuff can maintain a much higher throughput than them when attacked by Byzantine primary nodes.