An atomic member addition mechanism for permissioned blockchain based on autonomous rollback

Abstract

As a distributed ledger technology, the addition of new members in permissioned blockchain is usually composed of several steps among distributed nodes. The addition can not be considered successful until all of the steps are completed. In other words, these steps are an atomic operation. However, there is no solution for the atomic operation in existing permissioned blockchain, leading to an inconsistent state when the addition of new members is partially completed. To implement the atomic member addition in permissioned blockchain, we propose a method targeting at the atomic addition of new members based on distributed and autonomous rollback. After member addition starts, distributed nodes of existing members detect the new node and decide whether to rollback or not, instead of getting commands from the coordinator. After deciding to rollback, a new configuration block is added to achieve rollback of the uncompleted member addition. In order for the new configuration block to pass the policy validation of orderers, we set a rollback mode for orderers. The evaluation results show that our method can actually implement atomic member addition and has little impact on performance.