Leader Rotation Is Not Enough: Scrutinizing Leadership Democracy of Chained BFT Consensus

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 6 Jan 2025 (v1), last revised 23 Jun 2026 (this version, v2)] Leader Rotation Is Not Enough: Scrutinizing Leadership Democracy of Chained BFT Consensus Jianyu Niu, Yining Tang, Runchao Han, Chen Feng, Yinqian Zhang With the growing popularity of blockchains, modern chained BFT protocols combining chaining and leader rotation to obtain better efficiency and leadership democracy have received increasing interest. Although the efficiency provisions of chained BFT protocols have been thoroughly analyzed, the leadership democracy has received little attention in prior work. In this paper, we scrutinize the leadership democracy of four representative chained BFT protocols, especially under attack. To this end, we propose a unified framework with two evaluation metrics, i.e., chain quality and censorship resilience, and quantitatively analyze chosen protocols through the Markov Decision Process (MDP). With this framework, we further examine the impact of two key components, i.e., voting pattern and leader rotation on leadership democracy. Our results indicate that leader rotation is not enough to provide the leadership democracy guarantee; an adversary could utilize the design, e.g., voting pattern, to deteriorate the leadership democracy significantly. Based on the analysis results, we propose customized countermeasures for three evaluated protocols to improve their leadership democracy with only slight protocol overhead and no change of consensus rules. We also discuss future directions toward building more democratic chained BFT protocols. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) Cite as: arXiv:2501.02970 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2501.02970v2 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.02970 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yining Tang [view email] [v1] Mon, 6 Jan 2025 12:27:34 UTC (347 KB) [v2] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:30:37 UTC (2,254 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2025-01 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)