SodsBC: A Post-Quantum by Design Asynchronous Blockchain Framework

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 47 - 62
• Main Authors: Dolev, Shlomi, Guo, Bingyong, Niu, Jianyu, Wang, Ziyu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington IEEE 01.01.2024; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Asynchronous BFT; Blockchain; blockchain consensus; Blockchains; Censorship; Coins; Computer architecture; concurrent preprocessing; Cryptography; Encryption; Fault tolerance; nested hash; post-quantum; Preprocessing; Protocols; Quantum computing; secret sharing; Security
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2023.3243588

We present a new framework for asynchronous permissioned blockchain with high performance and post-quantum security. The framework contains two quantum-secure asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT) protocols, SodsBC and SodsBC++. We leverage concurrent preprocessing to accelerate the preparation of three cryptographic objects for the repeated consensus procedure, including common random coins as the needed randomness, secret shares of symmetric encryption keys for censorship resilience, and nested hash values for external validation predicates. The key idea behind our design is that the concurrent preprocessing mechanism can be well-supported by the consensus process of blockchains. The consumed objects in a block have been generated and globally agreed upon in a previous block. All our preprocessed objects utilize proven or commonly believed to be post-quantum cryptographic tools to resist an adversary equipped with quantum computation capabilities. We evaluate our protocols and their competitors in AWS in a typical setting where, the number of participants is 100 and each block part has 20,000 transactions. The results show that SodsBC and SodsBC++ reduce the latency of two state-of-the-art but quantum-sensitive competitors Honeybadger and Dumbo by 53% and 6%, respectively.