Marlin: Two-Phase BFT with Linearity
Xiao Sui, Sisi Duan, Haibin Zhang
Abstract
As the first Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol with linear communication complexity, HotStuff (PODC 2019) has received significant attention. HotStuff has three round-trips for both normal case operations and view change protocols. Follow-up studies attempt to reduce the number of phases for HotStuff. These protocols, however, all give up of one thing in return for another.This paper presents Marlin, a BFT protocol with linearity, having two phases for normal case operations and two or three phases for view changes. Marlin uses the same cryptographic tools as in HotStuff and introduces no additional assumptions. We implement a new and efficient Golang library for Marlin and HotStuff, showing Marlin outperforms HotStuff for both the common case and the view change.