A Flexible Sharding Blockchain Protocol Based on Cross-Shard Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Sharding technology is crucial to achieve decentralization, scalability, and security simultaneously. However, existing sharding blockchain schemes suffer from high cross-shard transaction processing latency, low parallelism, incomplete cross-shard views of shard members, centralized reconfiguration, high overhead of randomness generation, and lack of formalized protocol design and security proofs. This paper proposes a flexible sharding (FS) blockchain protocol. First, a cross-shard Byzantine fault tolerance (CSBFT) protocol is designed to cut down confirmation delays when processing cross-shard transactions. Second, we utilize multiple parallel CSBFT where each node acts not only as a leader but also as multiple ordinary members to break through the performance bottleneck caused by a leader's bandwidth and computing power, improving the system parallelism. Third, a cross-shard transaction censorship attack is proposed, and a cross-shard view-change mechanism is designed to defend against it. Fourth, a secure and truly decentralized shard reconfiguration method combining proof-of-work, proof-of-possession, and intra-shard BFT is designed. Fifth, we utilize a formal protocol design method and give strict security proof for each protocol. Finally, we evaluate FS from both theoretical and practical perspectives. FS is proven to have lower communication and computation complexity and achieve considerable performance.