5 ms·

Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus [pdf]

66 points by Mindphreaker 8y ago

robotrout 8y ago
Blockchains have been getting the lions share of attention for several years. PARSEC enabled networks, SAFE (MAIDSAFE) in particular, could change that. Blockchains have been battling energy usage, centralization and speed for awhile. Non-blockchain consensus should really open a lot of doors to allow decentralized, trustless, non-censorable solutions. It will be interesting to see what other networks besides SAFE adopt this consensus mechanism.
avastmick 8y ago
I always felt that blockchain is a precursor technology like "Web 2.0", which laid the technical foundations (of Web APIs and micro-services) that enabled the explosion of mobile apps that followed. If smarter people than me can mathematically verify the PARSEC algorithm as valid, it may lead the way for a radical change to the way information is propagated, secured and validated.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Mindphreaker 8y ago
  Yes, I'm also looking forward to what the crypto engineering community has to say about this algo after it has been peer-reviewed more often. If it holds the promises then it will would be VERY huge.
hobofan 8y ago
Nice! I found Hashgraph very interesting, but their patent stance made it a no-go for any serious DLT project. Glad that there is now a similar project without the attached patent! Let's just hope that it's not so similar that it falls under the original one. Still need to dig deeper into it, and would love to hear other peoples' evaluations, but at a first glance, PARSEC could actually be a serious player in the DLT game.
- DrTiaJolie 8y ago
  Boom! Nailed it. As much as I love the hashgraph tech, it is not pure both with respect to the patent AND the few dozen 'overseers' (or whatever they will be called) that they will have in place. They really need to have an opensource concept. I warned the Swirlds team that their tech will be knocked off--patent or no patent--so they better get big dominance fast!!
NathanC 8y ago
All my respect to David Irvine and his team, who have been working hard for 10y on this, busy coding instead of pumping. Despite all the skeptics and critics, he comes out with a groundbreaking solution, makes it open source, and even goes so far as to reaching out the competition to give them a heads-up. just wow.
Cshelton 8y ago
Medium article that goes with the release: https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-asynchronous-and-permissionless-consensus-e312d721f9d8 https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-a...
coolspot 8y ago
Without proof-of-work, what protects consenus from the sybil attack? As I understood, after quick scan of the paper, consensus is achieved by simple majority vote. So if I setup 10,000 docker containers running malicious nodes, I could take over the network and forge any blocks I want. What I am missing?
- SJMH 8y ago
  They mention 1/3 of the nodes. How much of a weakness is this?
  - saurik 8y ago
    How does that prevent me from pretending to be any number of nodes I want; including, but by no means limited to, over 1/3 of the nodes? (Maybe you should first do a quick search to learn what a Sybil attack actually is?) They can shore this up by having some kind of Sybil attack prevention elsewhere, but given their statements about proof-of-work here it seems unlikely they would, for example, add proof-of-work elsewhere. It might be, based on skimming some blog post I found if theirs, that the goal of this is to help them shore up a proof-of-stake algorithm to deal with byzantine failures? That would be interesting, but is a more involved scheme then than just this part, and I actually don't think that is what they are doing either (as the connection in that blog post is mostly me reaching for something that works, not a direct connection made by the authors).
    - pdx 8y ago
      For SAFE Network, this is handled, I believe. Other networks that implement PARSEC will need to address it in some similar way. In the case of SAFE, you can generate as many nodes as you want, but they must be valid nodes (doing the work that the network asks of them) for a long time before being promoted to a status that allows them to participate in consensus of a section. Any misbehavior on their part results in demotion or failure to be promoted. So each node would need to be a legitimate contributor to the network, with all that that entails, before being promoted to a status where their later misbehavior would matter. You would be creating real nodes, that used real bandwidth and real CPU resources and did real work that benefits the network, in order to infiltrate your evil nodes into the network. So, not an insubstantial cost to you. Your nodes will be assigned into sections randomly, so it will be very difficult for you to manage to get multiple nodes with voting status, into a single section, and staggeringly difficult to get enough such that your nodes constitute 1/3rd of that section. Of course, exactly how difficult depends on network size (number of sections). Finally, even once a node is assigned into a particular section, it will be reassigned to another random section at some interval, further decreasing your ability to take over a particular section.
OhDagny 8y ago
... so CAP theorem is disproven? This would imply that linearizable distributed transactions (in less byzantine networks) would be possible beyond what CAP enables. Or are they relying on availability assumptions?
equalunique 8y ago
Refreshing to see a maidsafe submission here on HN.
Jabbawa 8y ago
No noises from the big names in crypto yet. I guess many are carefully going through it and preparing their questions and concerns. Peer-review can't come quickly enough. I can't wait to see how the world responds to this. Have MaidSafe really managed to pull this off?! I mean, WOW, if they have! Fingers crossed.
SafeNigel 8y ago
A good point from the forum. “Now PARSEC won’t be used in SAFE to let the entire network communicate and come into global consensus like for example Bitcoin does, instead PARSEC will be used by many small sections of the network to reach “local” consensus for the corresponding section of the network. The obvious attack vector here is to join one section with many nodes of your own to hijack that particular section. The idea is to make this attack infeasible by having the network occasionally relocate nodes (when they age/rank up), so an attacker doesn’t have control over in what sections of the network its nodes are located. If this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory, attacking a section is about as hard as attacking the entire network (all the sections).” So proof-of-work is inherently resistant to sybil attacks while PARSEC on its own isn’t, so to tell the story properly the random but deterministic relocating of nodes needs to be included.
SafeNigel 8y ago
Interesting to see PARSEC mentioned in this topical piece. https://news.bitcoin.com/proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-following-spate-of-51-attacks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-f...

66 points by Mindphreaker 8y ago

Blockchains have been getting the lions share of attention for several years. PARSEC enabled networks, SAFE (MAIDSAFE) in particular, could change that. Blockchains have been battling energy usage, centralization and speed for awhile. Non-blockchain consensus should really open a lot of doors to allow decentralized, trustless, non-censorable solutions. It will be interesting to see what other networks besides SAFE adopt this consensus mechanism.

avastmick 8y ago

I always felt that blockchain is a precursor technology like "Web 2.0", which laid the technical foundations (of Web APIs and micro-services) that enabled the explosion of mobile apps that followed. If smarter people than me can mathematically verify the PARSEC algorithm as valid, it may lead the way for a radical change to the way information is propagated, secured and validated.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Mindphreaker 8y ago
Yes, I'm also looking forward to what the crypto engineering community has to say about this algo after it has been peer-reviewed more often. If it holds the promises then it will would be VERY huge.

hobofan 8y ago

Nice! I found Hashgraph very interesting, but their patent stance made it a no-go for any serious DLT project. Glad that there is now a similar project without the attached patent! Let's just hope that it's not so similar that it falls under the original one. Still need to dig deeper into it, and would love to hear other peoples' evaluations, but at a first glance, PARSEC could actually be a serious player in the DLT game.

DrTiaJolie 8y ago
Boom! Nailed it. As much as I love the hashgraph tech, it is not pure both with respect to the patent AND the few dozen 'overseers' (or whatever they will be called) that they will have in place. They really need to have an opensource concept. I warned the Swirlds team that their tech will be knocked off--patent or no patent--so they better get big dominance fast!!

NathanC 8y ago

All my respect to David Irvine and his team, who have been working hard for 10y on this, busy coding instead of pumping. Despite all the skeptics and critics, he comes out with a groundbreaking solution, makes it open source, and even goes so far as to reaching out the competition to give them a heads-up. just wow.

Cshelton 8y ago

Medium article that goes with the release: https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-asynchronous-and-permissionless-consensus-e312d721f9d8 https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-a...

coolspot 8y ago

Without proof-of-work, what protects consenus from the sybil attack? As I understood, after quick scan of the paper, consensus is achieved by simple majority vote. So if I setup 10,000 docker containers running malicious nodes, I could take over the network and forge any blocks I want. What I am missing?

SJMH 8y ago
They mention 1/3 of the nodes. How much of a weakness is this?
- saurik 8y ago
  How does that prevent me from pretending to be any number of nodes I want; including, but by no means limited to, over 1/3 of the nodes? (Maybe you should first do a quick search to learn what a Sybil attack actually is?) They can shore this up by having some kind of Sybil attack prevention elsewhere, but given their statements about proof-of-work here it seems unlikely they would, for example, add proof-of-work elsewhere. It might be, based on skimming some blog post I found if theirs, that the goal of this is to help them shore up a proof-of-stake algorithm to deal with byzantine failures? That would be interesting, but is a more involved scheme then than just this part, and I actually don't think that is what they are doing either (as the connection in that blog post is mostly me reaching for something that works, not a direct connection made by the authors).
  - pdx 8y ago
    For SAFE Network, this is handled, I believe. Other networks that implement PARSEC will need to address it in some similar way. In the case of SAFE, you can generate as many nodes as you want, but they must be valid nodes (doing the work that the network asks of them) for a long time before being promoted to a status that allows them to participate in consensus of a section. Any misbehavior on their part results in demotion or failure to be promoted. So each node would need to be a legitimate contributor to the network, with all that that entails, before being promoted to a status where their later misbehavior would matter. You would be creating real nodes, that used real bandwidth and real CPU resources and did real work that benefits the network, in order to infiltrate your evil nodes into the network. So, not an insubstantial cost to you. Your nodes will be assigned into sections randomly, so it will be very difficult for you to manage to get multiple nodes with voting status, into a single section, and staggeringly difficult to get enough such that your nodes constitute 1/3rd of that section. Of course, exactly how difficult depends on network size (number of sections). Finally, even once a node is assigned into a particular section, it will be reassigned to another random section at some interval, further decreasing your ability to take over a particular section.

OhDagny 8y ago

... so CAP theorem is disproven? This would imply that linearizable distributed transactions (in less byzantine networks) would be possible beyond what CAP enables. Or are they relying on availability assumptions?

equalunique 8y ago

Refreshing to see a maidsafe submission here on HN.

Jabbawa 8y ago

No noises from the big names in crypto yet. I guess many are carefully going through it and preparing their questions and concerns. Peer-review can't come quickly enough. I can't wait to see how the world responds to this. Have MaidSafe really managed to pull this off?! I mean, WOW, if they have! Fingers crossed.

SafeNigel 8y ago

A good point from the forum. “Now PARSEC won’t be used in SAFE to let the entire network communicate and come into global consensus like for example Bitcoin does, instead PARSEC will be used by many small sections of the network to reach “local” consensus for the corresponding section of the network. The obvious attack vector here is to join one section with many nodes of your own to hijack that particular section. The idea is to make this attack infeasible by having the network occasionally relocate nodes (when they age/rank up), so an attacker doesn’t have control over in what sections of the network its nodes are located. If this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory, attacking a section is about as hard as attacking the entire network (all the sections).” So proof-of-work is inherently resistant to sybil attacks while PARSEC on its own isn’t, so to tell the story properly the random but deterministic relocating of nodes needs to be included.

SafeNigel 8y ago

Interesting to see PARSEC mentioned in this topical piece. https://news.bitcoin.com/proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-following-spate-of-51-attacks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-f...