GEEC: Scalable, Efficient, and Consistent Consensus for Blockchains
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Blockchain technology has the potential to deploy broad decentralized applications, greatly improving their security and reliability. Unfortunately, despite much effort, no existing public blockchain protocol can ensure strong consistency with a high efficiency, while the reliability of permissioned blockchain relies on consortium members. We present GEEC, a new blockchain protocol and its runtime system by leveraging the strong confidentiality and integrity of the Intel Software Guard eXtentions (SGX) hardware. GEEC achieves strong privacy and security for permissioned blockchains with Intel SGX and provides an open membership scheme to make the blockchain scale as easily as a public blockchain. GEEC can append a block with only one and a half network round-trips and two P2P broadcasts. We carry a proof sketch to show that GEEC is strongly consistent. Extensive evaluation on both a public cloud and our own cluster shows that: (1) GEEC's block confirm latency was merely few seconds and scalable to the number of users; (2) it was robust on various network anomalies (e.g., partition attacks); and (3) its runtime system supports diverse decentralized applications. GEEC's source code and evaluation results are released on github.com/ndsi19-p25/geec.
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