Turtle Consensus
Stavros Nikolaou, Robbert van Renesse · 2015
Consensus is a basic building block in middleware configuration services [4, 18]. While such services are designed to tolerate crash failures in asynchronous settings, they may not stand up well to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Specifically, malicious clients can carefully craft workloads that substantially degrade the performance of many state-of-the-art consensus protocols. By exploiting protocol-specific vulnerabilities, attackers can constantly force the protocol participants to slow execution paths [8]. In this paper, we investigate designing consensus protocols that provide acceptable performance under DoS attacks that aim to saturate the bandwidth of protocol participants.