On Designs of Decentralized Reputation Management for Permissioned Blockchain Networks

In permissioned blockchain networks, the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus, which uses the election of authorized nodes to validate transactions and blocks, has been widely advocated thanks to its high transaction throughput and fault tolerance. However, PoA suffers from the drawback of centralization dominated by a limited number of authorized nodes and the lack of anonymity due to the round-robin block proposal mechanism. As a result, traditional PoA is vulnerable to a single point of failure that compromises the security of the blockchain network. To address these issues, we propose a novel decentralized reputation management mechanism for permissioned blockchain networks to enhance security, promote liveness, and mitigate centralization while retaining the same throughput as traditional PoA. This paper aims to design an off-chain reputation evaluation and an on-chain reputation-aided consensus. First, we evaluate the nodes' reputation in the context of the blockchain networks and make the reputation globally verifiable through smart contracts. Second, building upon traditional PoA, we propose a reputation-aided PoA (rPoA) consensus to enhance security without sacrificing throughput. In particular, rPoA can incentivize nodes to autonomously form committees based on reputation authority, which prevents block generation from being tracked through the randomness of reputation variation. Moreover, we develop a reputation-aided fork-choice rule for rPoA to promote the network's liveness. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed rPoA achieves higher security performance while retaining transaction throughput compared to traditional PoA.