An Analysis of Avalanche Consensus

作者Yin等人在最近的一篇白皮书中介绍了一种名为Snow共识的无领导、分散式共识协议家族。这些协议通过利用随机化和保持一定程度的拜占庭参与者韧性来解决现有共识方法（如使用工作量证明或法定人数）的局限性。至关重要的是，Snow共识是Avalanche区块链的基础，为流行的加密货币和运行智能合约的平台提供了支持。 Snow共识算法建立在自然、随机的例程上，参与者不断采样其他人的子集，并采用观察到的大多数值，直到达成共识。此外，Snow共识根据参与者的本地视图和安全参数定义条件。这些条件表示当一方能够有信心地确定其本地值，知道它将被诚实参与者采用时。 尽管Snow共识算法可以简洁地表述，但随机化、对抗影响和安全参数之间存在复杂的交互作用，需要对它们的安全性和活性进行正式分析。Snow协议是Avalanche类型区块链的基础，本文旨在通过揭示其活性和安全特性来增进我们对这些协议的理解。首先，我们从延迟和安全性的角度分析这些Snow协议。其次，我们揭示了一个设计问题，即这两者之间的权衡不利。第三，我们提出了对原始协议的修改，使这种权衡更加有利。

Snow consensus protocols and their security and liveness characteristics need to be analyzed and understood.

Snow consensus algorithms utilize randomization and local views to achieve consensus and finalize local values, while maintaining resilience against Byzantine participants. The paper proposes a modification to the original protocol to improve the trade-off between latency and security.

The paper provides a formal analysis of the security and liveness characteristics of Snow consensus protocols. It exposes a design issue in the original protocol and proposes a modification to improve the trade-off between latency and security. The experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of the modified protocol and compare it to the original. The paper also discusses the implications of the results for future research in this area.

Related work includes research on consensus protocols, blockchain technology, and distributed systems. Some relevant papers include 'The Byzantine Generals Problem' by Lamport et al., 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' by Nakamoto, and 'Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance' by Castro and Liskov.