RVRE: a secure and efficient committee-based consensus protocol leveraging reputation power

Abstract Committee-based consensus (CBC) is a promising technology to enhance the scalability of blockchain systems. However, the fair and secure selection of a committee in an open, non-permissioned chain remains a pressing challenge. Moreover, most existing CBC protocols still incorporate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithms for consensus, which have high communication complexity and low consensus efficiency. To address these problems, we present RVRE (a secure and efficient committee-based consensus protocol leveraging reputation power). RVRE focuses on committee selection and committee consensus. Regarding committee selection, we present Diversity Voting Power (DVP). Based on a reputation mechanism comprehensively reflecting node capabilities, DVP forms committees by extracting users’ Unit Reputation Power, introducing lottery element to prevent high centralization and effectively combating Sybil attacks. Moreover, during the extraction process, DVP fully utilize the heterogeneity among users to achieve better security with a smaller committee size. Regarding consensus within the committee, we enhance the HotStuff algorithm with reputation mechanism, resulting the Repu-HotStuff. Repu-HotStuff frees the three-stage paradigm of HotStuff from permission-based chain to more widely used non-permission-based chain, allowing it to overcome the complexities and dynamism of open environments. Moreover, the reputation mechanism improves the original efficiency of HotStuff by accurately reflecting the influence of capable nodes in consensus decisions and eliminating low-quality validations.