AnonymousFox: An Efficient and Scalable Blockchain Consensus Algorithm

Blockchain is an innovative application of distributed storage, consensus algorithm, encryption algorithm, and other computer technologies. The consensus algorithm is the key to keep consistent among blockchain nodes. In most existing consensus algorithms, the leader node is responsible for proposing new block and communicating with other nodes. The leader node is easy to be the target of malicious attackers. With the increase of the number of nodes, the throughput and scalability of the blockchain system are also unsatisfactory. To address such issues, we propose the AnonymousFox consensus algorithm, which is suitable for the consortium blockchain and private blockchain. First, we design an anonymous leader node sorting algorithm, which hides the identity of the leader node through a variety of encryption algorithms. It periodically changes the ordered leader list to hide the target of malicious attackers. In addition, we design a consensus algorithm based on the anonymous identity of the leader node. Through one-to-many message communication, the amount of messages is greatly reduced. The complexity of the algorithm is $O(n)$ . It solves the problem of ordered replication of state machines when the leader node is anonymous. We analyze the algorithm, it ensures safety and liveness when the fault nodes are less than one-third of the total. We evaluate the throughput, latency, scalability, resource consumption, exception processing, smart contract, and blockchain network through experiments. The throughput of the proposed algorithm is 49.3% higher than that of the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has high performance and scalability.

I. Introduction

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that has attracted strategic attention from various countries. It is a traceable and growing distributed ledger database. With the combination of blockchain technology with multiple scenarios, such as finance, trade, law, and IoT, the research and application of blockchain show an explosive growth trend [1].