TY - GEN
T1 - P-CFT: A Privacy-preserving and Crash Fault Tolerant Consensus Algorithm for Permissioned Blockchains
AU - Li, Wanxin
AU - Meese, Collin
AU - Nejad, Mark
AU - Guo, Hao
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is partially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under the Grant G2021KY05101.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Consensus algorithms play a critical role in blockchains and directly impact their performance. During consensus processing, nodes need to validate and order the pending transactions into a new block, which requires verifying the application-specific data encapsulated within a transaction. This exposes the underlying data to the consensus nodes, presenting privacy concerns. Existing consensus algorithms focus on realizing application security and performance goals, but lack privacy-by-design properties or are resource-heavy and intended for securing permissionless blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose P-CFT, a zero-knowledge and crash fault tolerant consensus algorithm for permissioned blockchains. The proposed consensus algorithm provides inherent data privacy directly to the consensus layer, while still providing guarantees of crash fault tolerance. We conduct experiments using the Hyperledger Ursa cryptographic library, and the results show promise for integrating P-CFT into existing permissioned blockchain systems requiring privacy-preserving and crash fault tolerant features.
AB - Consensus algorithms play a critical role in blockchains and directly impact their performance. During consensus processing, nodes need to validate and order the pending transactions into a new block, which requires verifying the application-specific data encapsulated within a transaction. This exposes the underlying data to the consensus nodes, presenting privacy concerns. Existing consensus algorithms focus on realizing application security and performance goals, but lack privacy-by-design properties or are resource-heavy and intended for securing permissionless blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose P-CFT, a zero-knowledge and crash fault tolerant consensus algorithm for permissioned blockchains. The proposed consensus algorithm provides inherent data privacy directly to the consensus layer, while still providing guarantees of crash fault tolerance. We conduct experiments using the Hyperledger Ursa cryptographic library, and the results show promise for integrating P-CFT into existing permissioned blockchain systems requiring privacy-preserving and crash fault tolerant features.
KW - Blockchain
KW - consensus
KW - privacy
KW - zero-knowledge proof
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125652798&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HotICN53262.2021.9680829
DO - 10.1109/HotICN53262.2021.9680829
M3 - Conference Proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85125652798
T3 - HotICN 2021 - 2021 4th International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking
SP - 26
EP - 31
BT - HotICN 2021 - 2021 4th International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 4th International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking, HotICN 2021
Y2 - 25 November 2021 through 27 November 2021
ER -