Siddhant Sharma

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2024-68

May 9, 2024

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2024/EECS-2024-68.pdf

Ethereum is the world’s largest permissionless blockchain that supports a large, decentral- ized validator set that is resilient to Byzantine faults and dynamic participation. However, Ethereum’s consensus protocol, Gasper, is plagued by requiring consecutive honest leaders to commit transactions or blocks. Thus, malicious leaders and even unsuspecting software bugs can easily weaken liveness of the system.

We reduce the commit latency of Gasper by relaxing the requirement of consecutive honest leaders to any honest leaders, allowing non-consecutive honest leaders to commit transac- tions. Our modifications, named Gasper-Siesta, maintains quadratic word complexity for message communication and retains properties that Ethereum strives to maintain. Further- more, our changes to the Ethereum consensus protocol are fairly limited in code, showing the feasibility of integrating the modifications into the Ethereum consensus protocol in production.

Advisors: Natacha Crooks

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BibTeX citation:

@mastersthesis{Sharma:EECS-2024-68,
    Author= {Sharma, Siddhant},
    Title= {Gasper-Siesta: Reducing Ethereum’s Commit Latency},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {2024},
    Month= {May},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2024/EECS-2024-68.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2024-68},
    Abstract= {Ethereum is the world’s largest permissionless blockchain that supports a large, decentral- ized validator set that is resilient to Byzantine faults and dynamic participation. However, Ethereum’s consensus protocol, Gasper, is plagued by requiring consecutive honest leaders to commit transactions or blocks. Thus, malicious leaders and even unsuspecting software bugs can easily weaken liveness of the system.

We reduce the commit latency of Gasper by relaxing the requirement of consecutive honest leaders to any honest leaders, allowing non-consecutive honest leaders to commit transac- tions. Our modifications, named Gasper-Siesta, maintains quadratic word complexity for message communication and retains properties that Ethereum strives to maintain. Further- more, our changes to the Ethereum consensus protocol are fairly limited in code, showing the feasibility of integrating the modifications into the Ethereum consensus protocol in production.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Sharma, Siddhant 
%T Gasper-Siesta: Reducing Ethereum’s Commit Latency
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2024
%8 May 9
%@ UCB/EECS-2024-68
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2024/EECS-2024-68.html
%F Sharma:EECS-2024-68