RobustETH: Ensuring Economic Fairness in ETH2.0’s Distributed Validator Technology
Shenghang Chen, Zhicheng Xu, Kun Zhou, Xiaoli Zhang, Hongbing Cheng · 2024
Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) mitigates single points of failure in Ethereum validators by distributing validator duties across a node cluster and making decisions within the cluster through consensus algorithms. However, these systems often fail to ensure economic fairness for participants, where misconduct by a few nodes can lead to financial losses for honest nodes within the cluster. To address this issue, we introduce RobustETH, an innovative DVT implementation that prioritizes operational efficiency and economic fairness for participants. Specifically, RobustETH incorporates an efficient consensus protocol, X-IBFT, to enhance DVT’s operational efficiency. Additionally, we propose a BFT forensic protocol and a reputation-based recluster strategy to accurately penalize malicious nodes and mitigate their impact, thereby safeguarding the financial interests of honest participants. Our theoretical analysis proves RobustETH’s safety, liveness, and accountability. Moreover, through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that RobustETH achieves a 58% reduction in end-to-end latency compared to current state-of-the-art DVT implementations while ensuring economic fairness.