Universally Composable Termination Analysis of Tendermint

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01097v2
• Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:52:35 GMT
• Title: Universally Composable Termination Analysis of Tendermint
• Authors: Zhixin Dong, Xian Xu, Yuhang Zeng, Mingchao Wan, Chunmiao Li,
• Abstract summary: This paper presents the first universally composable (UC) security analysis of Tendermint.<n>It demonstrates its resilience against strategic message-delay attacks.<n>Our main result proves that the Tendermint protocol UC-realizes the ideal Tendermint model.
• Score: 3.6181225888186055
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Modern blockchain systems operating in adversarial environments require robust consensus protocols that guarantee both safety and termination under network delay attacks. Tendermint, a widely adopted consensus protocol in consortium blockchains, achieves high throughput and finality. However, previous analysis of the safety and termination has been done in a standalone fashion, with no consideration of the composition with other protocols interacting with it in a concurrent manner. Moreover, the termination properties under adaptive network delays caused by Byzantine adversaries have not been formally analyzed. This paper presents the first universally composable (UC) security analysis of Tendermint, demonstrating its resilience against strategic message-delay attacks. By constructing a UC ideal model of Tendermint, we formalize its core mechanisms: phase-base consensus procedure, dynamic timeouts, proposal locking, leader rotation, and others, under a network adversary that selectively delays protocol messages. Our main result proves that the Tendermint protocol UC-realizes the ideal Tendermint model, which ensures bounded termination latency, i.e., guaranteed termination, even when up to $f<n/3$ nodes are Byzantine (where $n$ is the number of nodes participating in the consensus), provided that network delays remain within a protocol-defined threshold under the partially synchronous net assumption. Specifically, through formal proofs within the UC framework, we show that Tendermint maintains safety and termination. By the composition theorem of UC, this guarantees that these properties are maintained when Tendermint is composed with various blockchain components.

Related papers

• Time Is All It Takes: Spike-Retiming Attacks on Event-Driven Spiking Neural Networks [87.16809558673403]
  Spiking neural networks (SNNs) compute with discrete spikes and exploit temporal structure.<n>We study a timing-only adversary that retimes existing spikes while preserving spike counts and amplitudes in event-driven SNNs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-03T09:06:53Z)
• Rethinking Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Point Clouds from a Compact Subspace Perspective [55.919842734983156]
  CoSA is a transferable attack framework that operates within a shared low-dimensional semantic space.<n>CoSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transferable attacks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-30T15:48:11Z)
• HALO: Semantic-Aware Distributed LLM Inference in Lossy Edge Network [50.33808558714122]
  Large language models' (LLMs) inference at the edge can facilitate prompt service responsiveness while protecting user privacy.<n>We propose HALO, a novel framework that can boost the distributed LLM inference in lossy edge network.<n> Experimental results from a Raspberry Pi cluster demonstrate that HALO achieves a 3.41x end-to-end speedup for LLaMA-series LLMs under unreliable network conditions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-16T07:37:23Z)
• SoK: Speedy Secure Finality [0.0]
  This paper surveys the state of the art in fast finality protocol design.<n>We introduce the core theoretical primitives underlying this space.<n>We then analyze the communication and aggregation bottlenecks faced by single-slot finality protocols.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-23T19:25:02Z)
• Towards Efficient Agents: A Co-Design of Inference Architecture and System [66.59916327634639]
  This paper presents AgentInfer, a unified framework for end-to-end agent acceleration.<n>We decompose the problem into four synergistic components: AgentCollab, AgentSched, AgentSAM, and AgentCompress.<n>Experiments on the BrowseComp-zh and DeepDiver benchmarks demonstrate that through the synergistic collaboration of these methods, AgentInfer reduces ineffective token consumption by over 50%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-20T12:06:13Z)
• Safe Low Bandwidth SPV: A Formal Treatment of Simplified Payment Verification Protocols and Security Bounds [0.0]
  We show that SPV is not only secure under bounded adversarial assumptions but strictly optimal for digital cash systems requiring scalable and verifiable transaction inclusion.<n>This document serves both as a blueprint for secure SPV implementation and a rebuttal of common misconceptions surrounding non-validating clients.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-07-01T13:44:48Z)
• Accountable Liveness [9.474815797030628]
  We study what analogous accountability guarantees are achievable for liveness.<n>We prove a precise characterization of the parameter regime in which accountable liveness is achievable.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-16T16:13:09Z)
• Commit-Reveal$^2$: Securing Randomness Beacons with Randomized Reveal Order in Smart Contracts [25.885166716453153]
  We present Commit-Reveal$2$, a layered design for blockchain deployments that cryptographically randomizes the final reveal order.<n>The protocol is architected as a hybrid system, where routine coordination runs off chain for efficiency.<n>We release a publicly verifiable prototype and evaluation artifacts to support replication and adoption in blockchain applications.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-04T21:05:51Z)
• The Latency Price of Threshold Cryptosystem in Blockchains [52.359230560289745]
  We study the interplay between threshold cryptography and a class of blockchains that use Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols.<n>Our measurements from the Aptos mainnet show that the optimistic approach reduces latency overhead by 71%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-16T20:53:04Z)
• Defending Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks via Semantic Smoothing [107.97160023681184]
  Aligned large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. We propose SEMANTICSMOOTH, a smoothing-based defense that aggregates predictions of semantically transformed copies of a given input prompt.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-25T20:36:03Z)
• Short Paper: Accountable Safety Implies Finality [10.589723476970443]
  Two key desiderata have been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols. We show that accountable safety implies finality, thereby unifying earlier results.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-31T17:58:38Z)
• Is Vertical Logistic Regression Privacy-Preserving? A Comprehensive Privacy Analysis and Beyond [57.10914865054868]
  We consider vertical logistic regression (VLR) trained with mini-batch descent gradient. We provide a comprehensive and rigorous privacy analysis of VLR in a class of open-source Federated Learning frameworks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-07-19T05:47:30Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.