[Resource Topic] 2021/1465: Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

Welcome to the resource topic for 2021/1465

Title:
Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

Authors: Mahimna Kelkar, Soubhik Deb, Sishan Long, Ari Juels, Sreeram Kannan

Abstract:

We introduce Themis, a scheme for introducing fair ordering of transactions into (permissioned) Byzantine consensus protocols with at most f faulty nodes among n \geq 4f +1. Themis is the first such scheme to achieve (optimistic) linear communication complexity. At the same time, it enforces the strongest notion of fair ordering proposed to date. Themis also achieves standard liveness, rather than the weaker notion of previous work. We show experimentally that Themis can be integrated into state-of-the-art consensus protocols with minimal modification or performance overhead. Additionally, we introduce a suite of experiments of general interest for evaluating the practical strength of various notions of fair ordering and the resilience of fair-ordering protocols to adversarial manipulation. We use this suite of experiments to show that the notion of fair ordering enforced by Themis is significantly stronger in theory and for realistic workloads than those of competing systems. We believe Themis offers strong practical protection against many types of transaction-ordering attacks—such as front-running and back-running—that are currently impacting commonly used smart contract systems.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1465

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .