Paper 2024/452

Modeling Mobile Crash in Byzantine Consensus

Abstract

Targeted Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks have been a practical concern for permissionless blockchains. Potential solutions, such as random sampling, are adopted by blockchains. However, the associated security guarantees have only been informally discussed in prior work. This is due to the fact that existing adversary models are either not fully capturing this attack or giving up certain design choices (as in the sleepy model or asynchronous network model), or too strong to be practical (as in the mobile Byzantine adversary model). This paper provides theoretical foundations and desired properties for consensus protocols that resist against targeted DoS attacks. In particular, we define the Mobile Crash Adaptive Byzantine (MCAB) model to capture such an attack. In addition, we identify and formalize two properties for consensus protocols under the MCAB model, and analyze their trade-offs. As case studies, we prove that Ouroboros Praos and Algorand are secure in our MCAB model, giving the first formal proofs supporting their security guarantee against targeted DoS attacks, which were previously only informally discussed. We also illustrate an application of our properties to secure a streamlined BFT protocol, chained Hotstuff, against targeted DoS attacks.