SkyHash: an Opinion Dynamics Model for Hash Consensus over P2P network

Traditional Byzantine consensus does not work in P2P network due to Sybil attack while the most prevalent Sybil-proof consensus at present still can’t resist adversary with dominant compute power. This paper proposed a two-layered opinion dynamics model named SkyHash for hash consensus over P2P network. For hash consensus, failures are constrained due to the difficulty to create collision with big hash size, however, we identified DoS attack and extent our model to a DoS-proof one. Simulations show that on the SNAP dataset of the Wikipedia who-votes-on-whom network with reasonable latencies, the network will reach consensus within 45 seconds, and it can also tolerant DoS attack committed by 7% random nodes or 0.9% top influential nodes, where no correct nodes decide on different hashes and 4% nodes refuse to decide, at the cost of 50% reduction of throughput. Comparing to compute power based consensus, our approach can resist any faulty or malicious nodes by unfollowing them. To the best of our knowledge, it’s the first work dedicated to hash consensus on P2P network based on opinion dynamics.