Mitigating Cryptographic Bottlenecks of Low-Latency BFT Protocols
Aublin PL, Vogel A (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2025
Journal
Publisher: Springer
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
City/Town: Cham
Book Volume: 15730
Pages Range: 43-63
Conference Proceedings Title: Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems. 25th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2025, Held as Part of the 20th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2025, Lille, France, June 16–20, 2025, Proceedings
Event location: Lille
ISBN: 9783031957277
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-95728-4_3
Abstract
Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols enable applications to run even in the presence of arbitrary faults. Unfortunately, to reach a consensus on the order to execute client requests, these protocols perform costly cryptographic operations that limit their performance. This hinders their adoption for latency-sensitive applications executed in data-centres, such as fault-tolerant machine learning or finance applications. We propose two mechanisms to reduce the impact of digital signature verification: Speculative Execution to decouple consensus from the verification of the digital signature of protocol messages; and Secure Request Broadcast where replicas do not need to wait for the primary before they can verify a request signature. Both mechanisms are combined with a Blocklisting mechanism to ensure robustness against attacks. We implement both mechanisms in SPECULOR, a PBFT-based BFT protocol tailored for a relaxed fault model where clients do not crash and periodically retransmit their requests. Our evaluation shows SPECULOR reduces the tail-latency by at least 34% compared to PBFT while maintaining robustness under attacks. Finally, we discuss future modifications in order to apply this design to a wide range of BFT protocols under traditional assumptions.
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APA:
Aublin, P.-L., & Vogel, A. (2025). Mitigating Cryptographic Bottlenecks of Low-Latency BFT Protocols. In Daniel Balouek, Ibéria Medeiros (Eds.), Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems. 25th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2025, Held as Part of the 20th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2025, Lille, France, June 16–20, 2025, Proceedings (pp. 43-63). Lille, FR: Cham: Springer.
MLA:
Aublin, Pierre-Louis, and Arne Vogel. "Mitigating Cryptographic Bottlenecks of Low-Latency BFT Protocols." Proceedings of the 25th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, DAIS 2025 Held as Part of the 20th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2025, Lille Ed. Daniel Balouek, Ibéria Medeiros, Cham: Springer, 2025. 43-63.
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