Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Time in Hyperledger Fabric

Abstract

We have recently become witnesses of the constantly growing adoption of distributed ledger technology utilized in various domains, whereas for enterprise-grade solutions, the most prominent platform is Hyperledger Fabric [1]. However, the lack of a trusted source of time within the platform poses certain limitations in how this platform could be used. In particular, there is no built-in mechanism to ensure the expiration of the signing certificates during the validation phase of the transactions processing pipeline, which introduces severe concern from the platform’s usability and security point of view. Therefore, we would like to introduce a solution that incorporates Byzantine Fault Tolerant source of time into Hyperledger Fabric, where the suggested approach utilizes opened sourced implementation of SmartBFT [2] distributed consensus protocol.