IoTeX Published “Scalable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Short-Lived Signature Schemes” in CASCON 2018, Significantly Improved the Scalability of PBFT IoTeX Follow Oct 15, 2018 · 3 min read

Hello IoTeX supporters, we are happy to share some exciting news from the IoTeX R&D team with you!

Our latest academic paper Scalable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Short-Lived Signature Schemes has been accepted and published in CASCON 2018! This paper describes that IoTeX proposed an efficient short-lived signature based PBFT variant to improve the scalability of PBFT significantly.

Scalable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Short-Lived Signature Schemes

The Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm is a popular solution for establishing consensus in blockchain systems. The execution time of the PBFT consensus algorithm has an important effect on the blockchain throughput. Digital signatures are extensively used in PBFT to ensure the authenticity of messages during the different phases. Due to the round-based and broadcast natures of PBFT, nodes need to verify multiple signatures received from their peers, which incurs significant computational overhead and slows down the consensus process.

To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an efficient short-lived signature based PBFT variant, which utilizes short-length cryptographic keys to sign/verify messages in PBFT for a short period of time and blockchain-aided key distribution mechanisms to update those keys periodically. We also present efficient algorithms for accelerating the software implementation of the BLS threshold signature scheme. Our extensive experiments with three elliptic curves and two signature schemes demonstrate the efficacy of using short-lived signature schemes for improving the scalability of PBFT significantly.

CASCON 2018

Dr. Xinxin Fan, IoTeX’s Head of Cryptography and author of this academic paper, will be sharing this research in Toronto, Canada on October 30, 2018, as part of the CASCON 2018 academic conference.

CASCON is a premier industrial and academic conference for advanced studies in computer science and software engineering sponsored by the IBM Canada Laboratory. It attracts software developers, researchers, innovators, technologists and decision makers from academia, industry, and government who come together to learn about technology trends, present papers, participate in workshops, and exhibit prototypes and solutions.

Please see the full “Scalable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Short-Lived Signature Schemes” paper here.

November will be another exciting month for us, in which we will release our Mainnet Preview and share more exciting innovations with you. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest news and campaigns notices!

About IoTeX

IoTeX is the auto-scalable and privacy-centric blockchain infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoTeX’s global team is comprised of Ph.Ds in Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Machine Learning, top tier engineers, and experienced ecosystem builders. IoTeX is developing several in-house innovations to push the frontier of blockchain 3.0, including a blockchains-in-blockchain architecture for heterogeneous computing, lightning fast Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism, and lightweight privacy-preserving techniques. IoTeX is bringing autonomous device coordination to the masses by “connecting the physical world, block by block.”

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