T-RBFT: A Scalable and Efficient Byzantine Consensus Based on Trusted Execution Environment for Consortium Blockchain

2026-04-17

AI Summary

This work addresses the high communication overhead and limited performance of traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols in permissioned blockchains, even under the assumption that a majority of nodes are honest. To overcome these limitations, the paper proposes T-RBFT, a two-layer hybrid consensus mechanism leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). T-RBFT dynamically partitions nodes into shards: within each shard, an optimized Raft protocol efficiently processes requests, while inter-shard consensus is achieved through a lightweight BFT protocol assisted by TEEs. This design substantially reduces communication complexity and latency, significantly enhancing throughput and scalability without compromising security. Experimental results demonstrate that T-RBFT outperforms existing two-layer consensus approaches in both efficiency and robustness.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Abstract

With the continuous expansion of blockchain application scenarios, consortium chains have raised higher performance and security requirements for consensus mechanisms. Unlike public blockchains, consortium chains typically implement an admission mechanism that restricts participation to trusted entities, ensuring that most replicas are honest and the number of faulty nodes remains small under normal circumstances. In such settings, conventional Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols, which are designed for worst-case adversarial scenarios, incur excessive message exchanges and computational overhead, thereby limiting performance and scalability. To address this issue, this paper proposes T-RBFT, a two-layer consensus mechanism inspired by network sharding and enhanced by the trusted execution environment (TEE). In T-RBFT, consensus nodes are first dynamically grouped based on their runtime characteristics. Then, inter-group consensus is achieved through a TEE-assisted BFT protocol, while each group internally reaches agreement using an improved Raft-based mechanism. Experimental evaluation shows that T-RBFT reduces communication overhead and latency, and achieves higher throughput compared to existing two-layer consensus protocols, providing a scalable and communication-efficient consensus protocol for permissioned blockchain networks.

Problem

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Consortium Blockchain
• Consensus Mechanism
• Scalability
• Trusted Execution Environment

Innovation

• Trusted Execution Environment
• Two-layer Consensus
• Network Sharding
• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Consortium Blockchain