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Last updated Aug 10, 2022 Edit Source

An asynchronous system model total-order message broadcast protocol

Key features:

• Asynchrony: no timing assumptions. Messages can arrive at any time, and network speed determines the transaction rate
• Leaderless consensus: every node is a proposer. This eliminates potential attacks where a leader node can be stalled indefinitely, bringing the entire network to a halt

HoneyBadgetBFT (HBBFT) can be decomposed into nested subproblems:

• Subset
• Binary Agreement (BA)
• Threshold Sign

An example flow of how message broadcast might work with a transaction $x$

• QHB places this transaction, along with others it has received, into a queue of pending transactions
• A random process determines which transactions to include in the next block
• When $x$ is included in the contribution, it is submitted to Honey Badger. HB encrypts the list using threshold cryptography, creating a garbled version that contains your transaction but can’t be read. This is submitted to the Subset algorithm
• Subset puts it into a Reliable Broadcast instance for Node 1. This distributes the contribution to every other node in the network
• Once every node has received the encrypted contribution via RB, they know that all other correct nodes will also receive this contribution. They vote Yes in the Binary Agreement instance labelled Node 1, meaning that this contribution should be included as part of the next block
• Going back up to Subset, we now have $> \frac 2 3$contributions from all the nodes which are all encrypted
• In HB, we now have enough contributions to decrypt all of them. Each node gets $n$ lists of decrypted transactions, including $x$
• QHB then makes a union of the contributions and creates a single finalized list of transactions that all nodes have agreed on
• This final list is sent out of QHB and back to the application client

Some faster and more efficient alternatives have also been developed: