SoK: Consensus for Fair Message Ordering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Zhuolun, Pournaras, Evangelos
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Li, Zhuolun
Pournaras, Evangelos
author_facet Li, Zhuolun
Pournaras, Evangelos
contents Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness, particularly in decentralized finance applications, where nodes can exploit transaction orders to maximize rewards referred to as Maximal Extractable Value. This paper provides a systematic understanding of consensus protocols that order messages with different approaches, especially focusing on the ones that promote order fairness, using methods including First-In-First-Out (FIFO), random, and blind ordering. We review the challenges and trade-offs of deriving fair message ordering in a Byzantine fault-tolerant setting, and summarize the requirements for making a fair message ordering consensus protocol. We introduce a design guideline, with which we propose a latency optimization to the state-of-the-art FIFO ordering protocol of Themis. This work provides a systematic way for assessing and enhancing message order fairness in blockchain systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_09981
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoK: Consensus for Fair Message Ordering
Li, Zhuolun
Pournaras, Evangelos
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness, particularly in decentralized finance applications, where nodes can exploit transaction orders to maximize rewards referred to as Maximal Extractable Value. This paper provides a systematic understanding of consensus protocols that order messages with different approaches, especially focusing on the ones that promote order fairness, using methods including First-In-First-Out (FIFO), random, and blind ordering. We review the challenges and trade-offs of deriving fair message ordering in a Byzantine fault-tolerant setting, and summarize the requirements for making a fair message ordering consensus protocol. We introduce a design guideline, with which we propose a latency optimization to the state-of-the-art FIFO ordering protocol of Themis. This work provides a systematic way for assessing and enhancing message order fairness in blockchain systems.
title SoK: Consensus for Fair Message Ordering
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09981