arXiv subjects

Dakai Kang

Publications and source records attributed to Dakai Kang.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Hermes: Low Tail-Latency Via Prefix Consensus

Leader-based BFT protocols finalize through their leaders: a view whose leader is crashed or slow finalizes nothing, and the timeout that ends it admits no good setting. A conservative timeout turns every crashed leader into a long stall; an aggressive one voids the views of leaders that are merely slow. Either way the expired view is wasted, and this trade-off, not the good case, governs tail latency. Hermes makes expired views finalize. Hermes is a two-round rotating-leader protocol for $n=5f+1$ processes under partial synchrony built on prefix consensus: votes carry values ordered by a prefix relation, and quorums require comparability rather than equality. Every process broadcasts a justified proposal at view start and casts a single vote, for the leader's proposal upon delivery or for a fallback proposal at the timeout; there are no nullify votes. A timely honest leader finalizes its full proposal in $2\delta$. Otherwise, any $n-f$ votes, which need not match, finalize the heaviest common prefix. We instantiate Hermes as a finality gadget over an available chain and over Autobahn-style multi-lane dissemination, where parent-relative delta tipcuts with explicit skips keep independent proposals comparable and sender-indexed erasure-coded amplification keeps complexity at $O(n^2\hat{m}+\lambda n^3)$ bits and $O(n^2)$ messages per view, where $\hat{m}$ is the number of concurrent dissemination lanes in Autobahn and $\lambda$ the security parameter.

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arXiv2026

Cassandra: Consensus with Partial Progress via Robust Partitionable View Synchronization

Replicated databases and permissioned blockchain systems rely on Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus to maintain a globally consistent order of transactions across distributed replicas. These protocols preserve safety even under asynchrony, as they commit a transaction only after agreement among a strong quorum of replicas. During network partitions, however, when no strong quorum is reachable, they lose liveness and cannot make useful progress. In this paper, we present Cassandra, a consensus protocol that enables partial progress without sacrificing safety. Cassandra achieves this through a two-tier certification framework that decouples availability from commitment, allowing each partition to extend its own chain and reconcile these chains once the network is restored. To support this, Cassandra introduces a pacemaker that advances views without requiring a strong quorum and calibrates each replica's timeout off the critical path. Our evaluation results show that Cassandra remains competitive with state-of-the-art BFT protocols under stable conditions, sustaining 900K TPS at 16 replicas and 480K TPS at 104 replicas, with latency ranging from 0.31s at 16 replicas to 0.75s at 104 replicas. Under severe partitions, Cassandra maintains non-zero speculative throughput through PoA-backed progress, preserving work that can be reconciled once connectivity is restored.

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arXiv2025

Carry the Tail in Consensus Protocols

We present Carry-the-Tail, the first deterministic atomic broadcast protocol in partial synchrony that, after GST, guarantees a constant fraction of commits by non-faulty leaders against tail-forking attacks, and maintains optimal, worst-case quadratic communication under a cascade of faulty leaders. The solution also guarantees linear amortized communication, i.e., the steady-state is linear. Prior atomic broadcast solutions achieve quadratic word communication complexity in the worst case. However, they face a significant degradation in throughput under tail-forking attack. Existing solutions to tail-forking attacks require either quadratic communication steps or computationally-prohibitive SNARK generation. The key technical contribution is Carry, a practical drop-in mechanism for streamlined protocols in the HotStuff family. Carry guarantees good performance against tail-forking and removes most leader-induced stalls, while retaining linear traffic and protocol simplicity.

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arXiv2025

HotStuff-1: Linear Consensus with One-Phase Speculation

This paper introduces HotStuff-1, a BFT consensus protocol that improves the latency of HotStuff-2 by two network hops while maintaining linear communication complexity against faults. Furthermore, HotStuff-1 incorporates an incentive-compatible leader rotation design that motivates leaders to propose transactions promptly. HotStuff-1 achieves a reduction of two network hops by speculatively sending clients early confirmations, after one phase of the protocol. Introducing speculation into streamlined protocols is challenging because, unlike stable-leader protocols, these protocols cannot stop the consensus and recover from failures. Thus, we identify prefix speculation dilemma in the context of streamlined protocols; HotStuff-1 is the first streamlined protocol to resolve it. HotStuff-1 embodies an additional mechanism, slotting, that thwarts delays caused by (1) rationally-incentivized leaders and (2) malicious leaders inclined to sabotage other's progress. The slotting mechanism allows leaders to dynamically drive as many decisions as allowed by network transmission delays before view timers expire, thus mitigating both threats.

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arXiv2025

FairDAG: Consensus Fairness over Multi-Proposer Causal Design

The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has driven interest in blockchain database technology, with smart contracts enabling the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi). However, research has shown that adversaries exploit transaction ordering to extract profits through attacks like front-running, sandwich attacks, and liquidation manipulation. This issue affects blockchains where block proposers have full control over transaction ordering. To address this, a more fair transaction ordering mechanism is essential. Existing fairness protocols, such as Pompe and Themis, operate on leader-based consensus protocols, which not only suffer from low throughput caused by the single-leader bottleneck, but also allow adversarial block proposers to manipulate transaction ordering. To address these limitations, we propose a new framework, FairDAG, that runs fairness protocols on top of DAG-based consensus protocols. FairDAG improves protocol performance in both throughput and fairness quality by leveraging the multi-proposer design and validity property of DAG-based consensus protocols. We conducted a comprehensive analytical and experimental evaluation of two FairDAG variants - FairDAG-AB and FairDAG-RL. Our results demonstrate that FairDAG outperforms prior fairness protocols in both throughput and fairness quality.

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arXiv2025

Fides: Secure and Scalable Asynchronous DAG Consensus via Trusted Components

DAG-based BFT consensus has attracted growing interest in distributed data management systems for consistent replication in untrusted settings due to its high throughput and resilience to asynchrony. However, existing protocols still suffer from high communication overhead and long commit latency. In parallel, introducing minimal hardware trust has proven effective in reducing the complexity of BFT consensus. Inspired by these works, we present Fides, an asynchronous DAG-based BFT consensus protocol that, to our knowledge, is among the first to leverage TEEs to enhance both scalability and efficiency. Fides tolerates a minority of Byzantine replicas and achieves $O(\kappa n^2 + n^3)$ metadata communication complexity through a customized TEE-assisted Reliable Broadcast (T-RBC) primitive with linear communication complexity in one-step broadcast. Building on T-RBC, Fides redefines the DAG construction rules by reducing the reference requirement from $2f+1$ to $f+1$ between consecutive vertices. This new structure weakens DAG connectivity and invalidates traditional commit rules, so we formally abstract the problem and derive new theoretical bounds of liveness. We further propose a four-round commit rule that achieves the theoretically minimal commit latency. Besides, we design two additional primitives, T-RoundCert and T-Coin, to efficiently certify DAG references and replace the costly cryptographic common coin used in prior protocols. Comprehensive evaluations on geo-distributed and local testbeds show that Fides substantially outperforms state-of-the-art protocols, including Tusk, Bullshark, Mysticeti, RCC, Damysus, Achilles and HybridSet, achieving lower latency and higher throughput while preserving strong safety and liveness guarantees.

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arXiv2023

SpotLess: Concurrent Rotational Consensus Made Practical through Rapid View Synchronization

The emergence of blockchain technology has renewed the interest in consensus-based data management systems that are resilient to failures. To maximize the throughput of these systems, we have recently seen several prototype consensus solutions that optimize for throughput at the expense of overall implementation complexity, high costs, and reliability. Due to this, it remains unclear how these prototypes will perform in real-world environments. In this paper, we present SPOTLESS, a novel concurrent rotational consensus protocol made practical. Central to SPOTLESS is the combination of (1) a chained rotational consensus design for replicating requests with a reduced message cost and low-cost failure recovery that eliminates the traditional complex, error-prone view-change protocol; (2) the novel Rapid View Synchronization protocol that enables SPOTLESS to work in more general network assumptions, without a need for a Global Synchronization Time to synchronize view, and recover valid earlier views with the aid of non-faulty replicas without the need to rely on the primary; (3) a high-performance concurrent consensus architecture in which independent instances of the chained consensus operate concurrently to process requests with high throughput, thereby avoiding the bottlenecks seen in other rotational protocols. Due to the concurrent consensus architecture, SPOTLESS greatly outperforms traditional primary-backup consensus protocols such as PBFT (by up to 430%), NARWHAL-HS (by up to 137%), and HOTSTUFF (by up to 3803%). Due to its reduced message cost, SPOTLESS is even able to outperform RCC, a state-of-the-art high-throughput concurrent consensus protocol, by up to 23%. Furthermore, SPOTLESS is able to maintain a stable and low latency and consistently high throughput even during failures.

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