From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus

2025-06-17

AI Summary

This work addresses the problem of losslessly transforming arbitrary permissioned consensus protocols into permissionless proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocols, while strictly preserving the original protocol’s safety, liveness, optimistic responsiveness, composable ledger properties, and message complexity under partial synchrony and a quasi-permissionless model—and additionally introducing accountability (i.e., identification of culpable parties upon safety violations). To this end, we propose the first generic, property-preserving compiler framework that achieves such transformation without relying on internal mechanisms of the source protocol. Our compiler is the first to enable full attribute inheritance—including accountability with violation traceability—from permissioned protocols in the PoS permissionless setting. The construction integrates distributed consensus theory, Byzantine fault-tolerant modeling, protocol compilation, and composable security analysis, thereby establishing both theoretical foundations and constructive tools for enhancing security and trustworthiness in PoS systems.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies that property in the partially synchronous setting, the consequent proof-of-stake protocol also satisfies that property in the partially synchronous and quasi-permissionless setting (with the same fault-tolerance): consistency; liveness; optimistic responsiveness; every composable log-specific property; and message complexity of a given order. Moreover, our transformation ensures that the output protocol satisfies accountability (identifying culprits in the event of a consistency violation), whether or not the original permissioned protocol satisfied it.

Problem

• Transform permissioned consensus to proof-of-stake protocol
• Maintain original properties in quasi-permissionless setting
• Ensure accountability in output protocol

Innovation

• Generic compiler for consensus protocol transformation
• Preserves original properties in new setting
• Ensures accountability in output protocol