Open Access

ARTICLE

A Dynamic Reputation–based Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain

by Xiaofang Qiu^1,2, Zhi Qin^1,2,*, Wunan Wan^1,2, Jinquan Zhang^1,2, Jinliang Guo^1,2, Shibin Zhang^1,2, Jinyue Xia³

1 School of Cybersecurity, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, 610225, China
2 Advanced Cryptography and System Security Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, 610225, China
3 International Business Machines Corporation(IBM), NewYork, 10041NY212, USA

* Corresponding Author: Zhi Qin. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 73(2), 2577-2589. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.028757

Received 16 February 2022; Accepted 12 April 2022; Issue published 16 June 2022

Abstract

In recent years, Blockchain is gaining prominence as a hot topic in academic research. However, the consensus mechanism of blockchain has been criticized in terms of energy consumption and performance. Although Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, as a lightweight consensus mechanism, is more efficient than traditional Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS), it suffers from the problem of centralization. To this end, on account of analyzing the shortcomings of existing consensus mechanisms, this paper proposes a dynamic reputation-based consensus mechanism for blockchain. This scheme allows nodes with reputation value higher than a threshold apply to become a monitoring node, which can monitor the behavior of validators in case that validators with excessive power cause harm to the blockchain network. At the same time, the reputation evaluation algorithm is also introduced to select nodes with high reputation to become validators in the network, thus increasing the cost of malicious behavior. In each consensus cycle, validators and monitoring nodes are dynamically updated according to the reputation value. Through security analysis, it is demonstrated that the scheme can resist the attacks of malicious nodes in the blockchain network. By simulation experiments and analysis of the scheme, the result verifies that the mechanism can effectively improve the fault tolerance of the consensus mechanism, reduce the time of consensus to guarantee the security of the system.

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Keywords

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