Assessing Security and Performances of Consensus algorithms for Permissioned Blockchains

Abstract: Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been designed for permissionless block- chain on trustless network model through the proof-of-work, i.e. a mathematical challenge which requires high computational power. This solution suffers of poor performances, hence alternative consensus algorithms as the proof-of-stake have been proposed. Conversely, for permissioned blockchain, where participants are known and authenti- cated, variants of distributed consensus algorithms have been employed. However, most of them comes out without formal expression of security analysis and trust assumptions because the absence of an established knowledge. Therefore the lack of adequate analysis on these algorithms hinders any cautious evaluation of their effectiveness in a real-world setting where systems are deployed over trustless networks, i.e. Internet ...