A Practical Dynamic Enhanced BFT Protocol

Emerging as a distributed system maintaining a public ledger via consensus protocol, blockchain technology is showing its great potential in various scenarios such as supply chain, financial industry, internet of things (IoT), etc. Among kinds of consensus protocols, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols are playing an important part in the design of the blockchain system. Most BFT protocols, however, are static with no support for a dynamic property (i.e. nodes can join/leave a working system) and lack mechanisms to punish faulty nodes, which highly limit their wider adoption in the practical settings. This paper presents a dynamic enhanced BFT (DEBFT) protocol that is designed to support dynamic property and faulty nodes punishment. Based on HoneyBadger BFT, DEBFT employs Dynamic Threshold Identity-based Encryption and Distributed Key Generation to enable changes of the consensus group without reconfiguring the whole system, besides, evaluation metrics are also introduced to evaluate consensus nodes and clear faulty ones out of the system.

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