Navigation: DEDIS :: Cothority :: Building Blocks :: BftCoSi
WARNGING - BFTCoSi is deprecated, please use ByzCoinX.
If you use a single CoSi round to reach consensus, there are a number of things that might go wrong:
- If any of the node stalls the final phase of the signature, you cannot start another round without risking that node to finalize the signature later.
- If a node drops out, you cannot blame him without risking that the blamer itself blames a honest node.
Using PBFT we can solve this problem, but then we cannot use more than 10-15 nodes, because PBFT needs to broadcast all messages and thus incurs a O(n^2) communication cost.
To solve these problems, we introduce BFTCoSi, a protocol based on PBFT and that uses two rounds of CoSi. The first round is to assure that all the nodes are willing to sign the data. Only if a threshold of nodes give their agreement will the protocol proceed to the second round and get the actual signature on the data. If a node tries to freeze-attack in the first round, nothing is lost, and the protocol can be restarted excluding that node. Even if he tries later to validate the signature, it will not be accepted, as it's only the first round. If a node agrees in the first round to participate, but drops out in the second round, he can be blamed and everybody can verify that indeed he did agree to sign, but then he refused to do so in the second round. Instead of broadcasting all messages, the signature requests are sent through a tree-structure which reduces the communication cost to O(n).