BFT-DSN: A Byzantine Fault Tolerant Decentralized Storage Network

Abstract

With the rapid development of blockchain and its applications, the amount of data stored on decentralized storage networks (DSNs) has grown exponentially. DSNs bring together affordable storage resources from around the world to provide robust, decentralized storage services for tens of thousands of decentralized applications (dApps). However, existing DSNs do not offer verifiability when implementing erasure coding for redundant storage, making them vulnerable to Byzantine encoders. Additionally, there is a lack of Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus for optimal resilience in DSNs. This paper introduces BFT-DSN, a Byzantine fault-tolerant decentralized storage network designed to address these challenges. BFT-DSN combines storage-weighted BFT consensus with erasure coding and incorporates homomorphic fingerprints and weighted threshold signatures for decentralized verification. The implementation of BFT-DSN demonstrates its comparable performance in terms of storage cost and latency as well as superior performance in Byzantine resilience when compared to existing industrial decentralized storage networks.