Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) Sawtooth Consensus Service

Developed by Taekion specifically for Hyperledger Sawtooth v1.2

What is this?

This repo contains an aBFT consensus service that utilizes the HoneyBadger hbbft algorithms library in Rust by the POA Network.

What does it do?

It implements the Sawtooth Consensus interface and provides bindings into the set of HoneyBadger algorithms available in the POA Network's Rust library.

Getting Started

The codebase is intended to be a fully functional working implementation that can be adapted and customized for production scenarios depending on the asynchronous requirements and optimial HoneyBadger algorithms. It fully supports the threshold encryption pattern for guaranteed correctly sealed blocks.

This does not perform leader election, instead each validator acts as if they were the leader and proposes the next block. HoneyBadger then performs consensus on which proposed block is the agreed upon one and once reached, a threshold signature is created.

This pattern allows for custom logic to be added to the consensus service to additionally ensure the correctness of a block and the contained batches and transactions before voting. While no such logic is currently implemenated, different applications may utilize this capability to additionally restrict potentially compromised validators or other bad actors.

Configuration

The configuration is put in a JSON file and contains the threshold secret key share and public key set information.

{
  "sec_key_share":[
    9618116941043444446,
    3910152738615756309,
    7294972905033048309,
    5704457943483918691
  ],
  "pkset": {
    "commit": {
      "coeff":[
        [178,56,216,197,27,204,79,229,40,56,147,69,207,103,88,221,69,165,106,173,37,233,124,62,204,172,118,108,194,63,18,8,102,140,252,202,213,177,88,64,112,89,246,95,201,172,185,229],
        [182,170,64,130,170,60,161,161,187,55,59,107,175,219,171,129,174,125,36,148,93,9,123,239,182,104,9,142,44,78,106,147,159,101,166,125,230,169,98,122,190,184,255,25,185,162,37,170]
      ]
    }
  }
}

The genshares tool can help you generate your config, pass it all of the public key identities of your validators as args:

> genshares \
02dfb9b074448ab903cc84ec543f80250fd0b1a43b162f2ce0e92485417ec3e14e \
02ecafa9876c04380a385f61c085ec9f6157ff50d49624c9b45e1819a14ac0e424 \
03c0fea0ed3d65cfd89df54a8158ae7a7d746f1c51aaab4e2b5dcb1e913e8fd7ee \
0280f795a25d24e522704f13742cd27b40bf551f10052bb62100e81b91f20c6427 \
0271b324b68efb2a389dc4193c03138ef5d62971dce9dd5046de3b205ceeaf3812

Running

Three arguments are available:

• -v: Verbose output, can be present up to 3 times for more verbosity
• -C || --connect: The validator endpoint to connect to
• -c: The path to the json config file described above

Example run line: abft-consensus -vv --connect tcp://validator:5050 -c /etc/sawtooth/abft.json