An Empirical Study of Consensus Protocols’ DoS Resilience
Giacomo Giuliari, Alberto Sonnino, Marc Frei, Fabio Streun, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Adrian Perrig · 2024
With the proliferation of blockchain technology in high-value sectors, consensus protocols are becoming critical infrastructures. The rapid innovation cycle in Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols has culminated in HotStuff, which provides linear message complexity in the partially synchronous setting. To achieve this, HotStuff leverages a leader that collects, aggregates, and broadcasts the messages of other validators. This paper analyzes the security implications of such approaches in practice, from the perspective of liveness and availability.