Frosty: bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols

Buchwald, Aaron, Buttolph, Stephen, Lewis-Pye, Andrew, O'Grady, Patrick and Sekniqi, Kevin (2024) Frosty: bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2025, 2025-04-14 - 2025-04-18, Hotel Shigira Mirage, Miyakojima, Japan, JPN. (In Press)

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Abstract

Snowman is the consensus protocol implemented by the Avalanche blockchain and is part of the Snow family of protocols, first introduced through the original Avalanche leaderless consensus protocol. A major advantage of Snowman is that each consensus decision only requires an expected constant communication overhead per processor in the `common' case that the protocol is not under substantial Byzantine attack, i.e. it provides a solution to the scalability problem which ensures that the expected communication overhead per processor is independent of the total number of processors n during normal operation. This is the key property that would enable a consensus protocol to scale to 10,000 or more independent validators (i.e. processors). On the other hand, the two following concerns have remained: (1) Providing formal proofs of consistency for Snowman has presented a formidable challenge. (2) Liveness attacks exist in the case that a Byzantine adversary controls more than O(n−−√) processors, slowing termination to more than a logarithmic number of steps. In this paper, we address the two issues above. We consider a Byzantine adversary that controls at most f<n/5 processors. First, we provide a simple proof of consistency for Snowman. Then we supplement Snowman with a `liveness module' that can be triggered in the case that a substantial adversary launches a liveness attack, and which guarantees liveness in this event by temporarily forgoing the communication complexity advantages of Snowman, but without sacrificing these low communication complexity advantages during normal operation.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Date Deposited:	08 Jan 2025 10:54
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2025 00:07
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126437

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