{"ID":2881736,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12173","arxiv_id":"2508.12173","title":"Carry the Tail in Consensus Protocols","abstract":"We present Carry-the-Tail, the first deterministic atomic broadcast protocol in partial synchrony that, after GST, guarantees a constant fraction of commits by non-faulty leaders against tail-forking attacks, and maintains optimal, worst-case quadratic communication under a cascade of faulty leaders. The solution also guarantees linear amortized communication, i.e., the steady-state is linear. Prior atomic broadcast solutions achieve quadratic word communication complexity in the worst case. However, they face a significant degradation in throughput under tail-forking attack. Existing solutions to tail-forking attacks require either quadratic communication steps or computationally-prohibitive SNARK generation. The key technical contribution is Carry, a practical drop-in mechanism for streamlined protocols in the HotStuff family. Carry guarantees good performance against tail-forking and removes most leader-induced stalls, while retaining linear traffic and protocol simplicity.","short_abstract":"We present Carry-the-Tail, the first deterministic atomic broadcast protocol in partial synchrony that, after GST, guarantees a constant fraction of commits by non-faulty leaders against tail-forking attacks, and maintains optimal, worst-case quadratic communication under a cascade of faulty leaders. The solution also...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12173","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12173v1","authors":"[\"Suyash Gupta\",\"Dakai Kang\",\"Dahlia Malkhi\",\"Mohammad Sadoghi\"]","published":"2025-08-16T22:39:01Z","proceeding":"cs.DB","tasks":"[\"cs.DB\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}