PoS-CoPOR: Proof-of-Stake Consensus Protocol with Native Onion Routing Providing Scalability and DoS-Resistance

2025-10-06

AI Summary

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus often faces a trade-off between performance and security: predetermined leader selection is vulnerable to targeted denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, compromising network liveness. This paper proposes the first PoS consensus protocol that natively integrates onion routing to anonymize block proposers’ network identities, thereby mitigating DoS threats at the protocol level. Our approach features: (i) stake-weighted probabilistic leader election, (ii) a lightweight onion-routing anonymity layer, (iii) a single-chain architecture, and (iv) efficient encrypted inter-node communication. Experimental evaluation in a 6-node setting achieves 110 transactions per second; the overhead introduced by anonymization remains bounded. Compared to conventional pre-selected leader schemes, our protocol significantly enhances DoS resilience while preserving high security, strong liveness, and scalability.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Application Domains: Security
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and compromise liveness. In this work, we present PoS-CoPOR, a single-chain PoS consensus protocol that mitigates this vulnerability by integrating a native onion routing mechanism into the consensus protocol itself. PoS-CoPOR combines stake-weighted probabilistic leader election with an anonymization layer that conceals the network identity of the next block proposer. This approach prevents targeted DoS attacks on leaders before they produce a block, thus enhancing network resilience. We implemented and evaluated PoS-CoPOR, demonstrating its ability to achieve a throughput of up to 110 tx/s with 6 nodes, even with the overhead of the anonymization layer. The results show that native anonymization can provide robust DoS resistance with only a modest impact on performance, offering a solution to build secure and scalable PoS blockchains.

Problem

• Mitigating DoS vulnerability in pre-elected leader protocols
• Concealing next block proposer identity via onion routing
• Achieving DoS resistance with minimal performance impact

Innovation

• Integrated native onion routing into PoS protocol
• Used stake-weighted probabilistic leader election method
• Concealed next block proposer identity for security