arXiv subjects

Hasan Heydari

Publications and source records attributed to Hasan Heydari.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

MVP-ORAM: a Wait-free Concurrent ORAM for Confidential BFT Storage

It is well known that encryption alone is not enough to protect data privacy. Access patterns, revealed when operations are performed, can also be leveraged in inference attacks. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) hides access patterns by making client requests oblivious. However, existing protocols are still limited in supporting concurrent clients and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). We present MVP-ORAM, the first wait-free ORAM protocol that supports concurrent fail-prone clients. In contrast to previous works, MVP-ORAM avoids using trusted proxies, which require additional security assumptions, and concurrency control mechanisms based on inter-client communication or distributed locks, which limit overall throughput and the capability of tolerating faulty clients. Instead, MVP-ORAM enables clients to perform concurrent requests and merge conflicting updates as they happen, satisfying wait-freedom, i.e., clients make progress independently of the performance or failures of other clients. Since wait and collision freedom are fundamentally contradictory goals that cannot be achieved simultaneously in an asynchronous concurrent ORAM service, we define a weaker notion of obliviousness that depends on the application workload and number of concurrent clients, and prove MVP-ORAM is secure in practical scenarios where clients perform skewed block accesses. By being wait-free, MVP-ORAM can be seamlessly integrated into existing confidential BFT data stores, creating the first BFT ORAM construction. We implement MVP-ORAM on top of a confidential BFT data store and show our prototype can process hundreds of 4KB accesses per second in modern clouds.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

QScale: Probabilistic Chained Consensus for Moderate-Scale Systems

Existing distributed ledger protocols either incur a high communication complexity and are thus suited to systems with a small number of processes (e.g., PBFT), or rely on committee-sampling-based approaches that only work for a very large number of processes (e.g., Algorand). Neither of these lines of work is well-suited for moderate-scale distributed ledgers ranging from a few hundred to a thousand processes, which are common in production (e.g, Redbelly, Sui). The goal of this work is to design a distributed ledger with sub-linear communication complexity per process, sub-quadratic total communication complexity, and low latency for finalizing a block into the ledger, such that it can be used for moderate-scale systems. We propose QScale, a protocol in which every process incurs only $\widetilde{O}(\kappa \sqrt{n})$ communication complexity per-block in expectation, $\widetilde{O}(n\kappa)$ total communication complexity per-block in expectation, and a best-case latency of $O(\kappa)$ rounds while ensuring safety and liveness with overwhelming probability, with $\kappa$ being a small security parameter.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Knowledge Connectivity Requirements for Solving BFT Consensus with Unknown Participants and Fault Threshold (Extended Version)

Consensus stands as a fundamental building block for constructing reliable and fault-tolerant distributed services. The increasing demand for high-performance and scalable blockchain protocols has brought attention to solving consensus in scenarios where each participant joins the system knowing only a subset of participants. In such scenarios, the participants' initial knowledge about the existence of other participants can collectively be represented by a directed graph known as knowledge connectivity graph. The Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus with Unknown Participants (BFT-CUP) problem aims to solve consensus in those scenarios by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions that the knowledge connectivity graphs must satisfy when a fault threshold is provided to all participants. This work extends BFT-CUP by eliminating the requirement to provide the fault threshold to the participants. We indeed address the problem of solving BFT consensus in settings where each participant initially knows a subset of participants, and although a fault threshold exists, no participant is provided with this information -- referred to as BFT Consensus with Unknown Participants and Fault Threshold (BFT-CUPFT). With this aim, we first demonstrate that the conditions for knowledge connectivity graphs identified by BFT-CUP are insufficient to solve BFT-CUPFT. Accordingly, we introduce a new type of knowledge connectivity graphs by determining the necessary and sufficient conditions they must satisfy to solve BFT-CUPFT. Furthermore, we design a protocol for solving BFT-CUPFT.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Extended Version)

Consensus is a fundamental building block for constructing reliable and fault-tolerant distributed services. Many Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols designed for partially synchronous systems adopt a pessimistic approach when dealing with adversaries, ensuring safety in a deterministic way even under the worst-case scenarios that adversaries can create. Following this approach typically results in either an increase in the message complexity (e.g., PBFT) or an increase in the number of communication steps (e.g., HotStuff). In practice, however, adversaries are not as powerful as the ones assumed by these protocols. Furthermore, it might suffice to ensure safety and liveness properties with high probability. In order to accommodate more realistic and optimistic adversaries and improve the scalability of the BFT consensus, we propose ProBFT (Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance). ProBFT is a leader-based probabilistic consensus protocol with a message complexity of $O(n\sqrt{n})$ and an optimal number of communication steps that tolerates Byzantine faults in permissioned partially synchronous systems. It is built on top of well-known primitives, such as probabilistic Byzantine quorums and verifiable random functions. ProBFT guarantees safety and liveness with high probabilities even with faulty leaders, as long as a supermajority of replicas is correct, and using only a fraction of messages employed in PBFT (e.g., $20\%$). We provide a detailed description of ProBFT's protocol and its analysis.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

On the Minimal Knowledge Required for Solving Stellar Consensus

Byzantine Consensus is fundamental for building consistent and fault-tolerant distributed systems. In traditional quorum-based consensus protocols, quorums are defined using globally known assumptions shared among all participants. Motivated by decentralized applications on open networks, the Stellar blockchain relaxes these global assumptions by allowing each participant to define its quorums using local information. A similar model called Consensus with Unknown Participants (CUP) studies the minimal knowledge required to solve consensus in ad-hoc networks where each participant knows only a subset of other participants of the system. We prove that Stellar cannot solve consensus using the initial knowledge provided to participants in the CUP model, even though CUP can. We propose an oracle called sink detector that augments this knowledge, enabling Stellar participants to solve consensus.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

How Hard is Asynchronous Weight Reassignment? (Extended Version)

The performance of distributed storage systems deployed on wide-area networks can be improved using weighted (majority) quorum systems instead of their regular variants due to the heterogeneous performance of the nodes. A significant limitation of weighted majority quorum systems lies in their dependence on static weights, which are inappropriate for systems subject to the dynamic nature of networked environments. To overcome this limitation, such quorum systems require mechanisms for reassigning weights over time according to the performance variations. We study the problem of node weight reassignment in asynchronous systems with a static set of servers and static fault threshold. We prove that solving such a problem is as hard as solving consensus, i.e., it cannot be implemented in asynchronous failure-prone distributed systems. This result is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the recent results showing that two related problems -- replica set reconfiguration and asset transfer -- can be solved in asynchronous systems. Inspired by these problems, we present two versions of the problem that contain restrictions on the weights of servers and the way they are reassigned. We propose a protocol to implement one of the restricted problems in asynchronous systems. As a case study, we construct a dynamic-weighted atomic storage based on such a protocol. We also discuss the relationship between weight reassignment and asset transfer problems and compare our dynamic-weighted atomic storage with reconfigurable atomic storage.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Consensus-Free Weight Reassignment for Atomic Storage (Extended Version)

Weighted voting is a conventional approach to improving the performance of replicated systems based on commonly-used majority quorum systems in heterogeneous environments. In long-lived systems, a weight reassignment protocol is required to reassign weights over time in order to accommodate performance variations accordingly. The weight reassignment protocol should be consensus-free in asynchronous failure-prone systems because of the impossibility of solving consensus in such systems. This paper presents an efficient consensus-free weight reassignment protocol for atomic storage systems in heterogeneous, dynamic, and asynchronous message-passing systems. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed protocol improves the performance of atomic read/write storage implemented by majority quorum systems compared with previous solutions.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Distributed Maximal Independent Set on Scale-Free Networks

The problem of distributed maximal independent set (MIS) is investigated on inhomogeneous random graphs with power-law weights by which the scale-free networks can be produced. Such a particular problem has been solved on graphs with $n$ vertices by state-of-the-art algorithms with the time complexity of $O(\log{n})$. We prove that for a scale-free network with power-law exponent $β> 3$, the induced subgraph is constructed by vertices with degrees larger than $\log{n}\log^{*}{n}$ is a scale-free network with $β' = 2$, almost surely (a.s.). Then, we propose a new algorithm that computes an MIS on scale-free networks with the time complexity of $O(\frac{\log{n}}{\log{\log{n}}})$ a.s., which is better than $O(\log{n})$. Furthermore, we prove that on scale-free networks with $β\geq 3$, the arboricity and degeneracy are less than $2^{log^{1/3}n}$ with high probability (w.h.p.). Finally, we prove that the time complexity of finding an MIS on scale-free networks with $β\geq 3$ is $O(log^{2/3}n)$ w.h.p.

cs.DC↗