Scalable Agreement Protocols with Optimal Optimistic Efficiency

Yuval Gelles*, Ilan Komargodski

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Designing efficient distributed protocols for various agreement tasks such as Byzantine Agreement, Broadcast, and Committee Election is a fundamental goal with many applications, including most secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols. Motivated by modern large-scale settings, we are interested in scalable protocols for these tasks, where each (honest) party communicates a number of bits which is sub-linear in n, the number of parties. The state of the art protocols require each party to send O~(n) bits (We use the notation O~(·),Ω~(·) to hide poly-logarithmic factors in n) throughout O~(1) rounds. Despite significant efforts, getting protocols with o(n) communication per party has been a major challenge for several decades. We propose a new framework for designing efficient agreement protocols. Specifically, we design O~(1)-round protocols for all of the above tasks (assuming constant <1/3 fraction of static corruptions) with the following guarantees:Optimistic complexity: In an honest execution, (honest) parties send only O~(1) bits.Pessimistic complexity: In any other case, (honest) parties send O~(n) bits. Optimistic complexity: In an honest execution, (honest) parties send only O~(1) bits. Pessimistic complexity: In any other case, (honest) parties send O~(n) bits. Thus, all an adversary can gain from deviating from the honest execution is that honest parties will need to work harder (i.e., transmit more bits) to reach agreement and terminate. We use our new framework to get a scalable MPC protocol with optimistic and pessimistic complexities. Technically, we identify a relaxation of Byzantine Agreement (of independent interest) that allows us to fall-back to a pessimistic execution in a coordinated way by all parties. We implement this relaxation with O~(1) communication bits per party and within O~(1) rounds.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSecurity and Cryptography for Networks - 14th International Conference, SCN 2024, Proceedings
EditorsClemente Galdi, Duong Hieu Phan
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages297-319
Number of pages23
ISBN (Print)9783031710698
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event14th Conference on Security and Cryptography for Networks, SCN 2024 - Amalfi, Italy
Duration: 11 Sep 202413 Sep 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14973 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th Conference on Security and Cryptography for Networks, SCN 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityAmalfi
Period11/09/2413/09/24

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.

Keywords

  • Optimistic Efficiency
  • Scalable Byzantine Agreement
  • Secure Computation

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