Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Vmware, Inc.

Soumya Basu

Ramarathnam R Venkatesan

Srinath Setty

Dahlia Malkhi

Ittai Abraham

Guy Golan Gueta

Michael Reiter

Alin Tomescu

Adrian Seredinschi

Lidong Zhou

Michael Lowell Roberts

Heartbeat consensus forming for the state of a digital ledger built upon a blockchain to provide users with the ability to securely, accurately, and verifiably share state information between distrustful parties is provided herein. The digital ledger is hosted in a networked environment, accessible by multiple parties. Heartbeat transactions allow clients, who are not in direct communication with one another and may distrust one another, to verify the integrity of the digital ledger via consensus. The consensus is readily verifiable by each client on its own machine and allows the ledger to be recovered to an agreed-to state in the event of a fault initiated by a client or the host of the ledger, whether malicious or otherwise. The digital ledger is freely movable to different hosts in the event of a fault.

Heartbeats and consensus in verifiable outsourced ledgers

Techniques for implementing Byzantine fault tolerance with verifiable secret sharing at constant overhead are provided. In one set of embodiments, a client can determine a secret value s to be shared with N replicas in a distributed system, s being input data for a service operation provided by the N replicas. The client can further encode s into an f-degree polynomial P(x) where f corresponds to a maximum number of faulty replicas in the distributed system, evaluate P(x) at i for i=1 to N resulting in N evaluations P(i), generate at least one f-degree recovery polynomial R(x) based on a distributed pseudo-random function (DPRF) f(x), and evaluate R(x) at i for i=1 to N resulting in at least N evaluations R(i). The client can then invoke the service operation, the invoking comprising transmitting a message including P(i) and R(i) to each respective replica i.

Byzantine fault tolerance with verifiable secret sharing at constant overhead

Systems and methods described herein relate to secure, efficient, confidential, and/or outsourced blockchain networks, which can enable a group of mutually distrusting participants to securely share state and then agree on a linear history of operations on that shared state.

Blockchain system for leveraging member nodes to achieve consensus

Growing community of inventors

Ithaca, NY, United States of America

Soumya Basu