Concord-BFT: a Distributed Trust Infrastructure

Overview

Project Concord is a highly scalable and energy-efficient distributed trust infrastructure for consensus and smart contract execution.

concord-bft

The core engine of project Concord is concord-bft, a generic state machine replication library that can handle malicious (byzantine) replicas. This library is designed to be used as a core building block for replicated distributed data stores, and is especially suited to serve as the basis of permissioned Blockchain systems. Its implementation is based on the algorithm described in the paper SBFT: a Scalable Decentralized Trust Infrastructure for Blockchains.

Releases

We abide by semantic versioning. Public APIs can change at any time until we reach version 1.0. We will, however, bump the minor version when a backwards incompatible change is made.

v0.5

Roadmap

We plan to release updates in a quarterly schedule. The next releases will include: optimized State transfer modules with rocksdb integration, configuration and key generation tools, generic key-value interface, and execution engine for EVM smart contracts. We also plan to support Windows, OS X, and additional Linux distributions.

Contributing

The concord-bft project team welcomes contributions from the community. If you wish to contribute code and you have not signed our contributor license agreement (CLA), our bot will update the issue when you open a Pull Request. For any questions about the CLA process, please refer to our FAQ. For more detailed information, refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.

Community

Concord-BFT Slack.

Get Slack invitation via this link or send request to concordbft@gmail.com.

Directory structure

bftengine: concord-bft codebase
- include: external interfaces of concord-bft (to be used by client applications)
- src: internal implementation of concord-bft
- tests: tests and usage examples
threshsign: crypto library that supports digital threshold signatures
- include: external interfaces of threshsign (to be used by client applications)
- src: internal implementation of threshsign
- tests: tests and usage examples
scripts: build scripts

License

concord-bft is available under the Apache 2 license.

Build (Ubuntu Linux 18.04)

Dependencies

CMake and clang:

sudo apt-get install cmake clang clang-format

Get GMP (dependency for RELIC):

sudo apt-get install libgmp3-dev

Build and install RELIC

cd
git clone https://github.com/relic-toolkit/relic
cd relic/
git checkout b984e901ba78c83ea4093ea96addd13628c8c2d0
mkdir -p build/
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DALLOC=AUTO -DWSIZE=64 -DRAND=UDEV -DSHLIB=ON -DSTLIB=ON -DSTBIN=OFF -DTIMER=HREAL -DCHECK=on -DVERBS=on -DARITH=x64-asm-254 -DFP_PRIME=254 -DFP_METHD="INTEG;INTEG;INTEG;MONTY;LOWER;SLIDE" -DCOMP="-O3 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-small-functions -march=native -mtune=native" -DFP_PMERS=off -DFP_QNRES=on -DFPX_METHD="INTEG;INTEG;LAZYR" -DPP_METHD="LAZYR;OATEP" ..
make
sudo make install

Build and install cryptopp

cd
git clone https://github.com/weidai11/cryptopp.git
cd cryptopp/
git checkout CRYPTOPP_5_6_5;
mkdir build/
cd build/
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Get GNU Parallel

sudo apt-get install parallel

Get g++:

sudo apt-get install g++

(Optional) Use log4cplus

We have simple console logger but if you wish to use log4cplus - we have an infra that supports it.

Follow below steps for installing this library:

Install prerequisites:

    sudo apt-get install autoconf automake

Clone the repository:

    git clone https://github.com/log4cplus/log4cplus.git

Move to the extracted directory and checkout the appropriate branch:

    cd log4cplus
    git checkout REL_1_2_1

Edit configure to change "am__api_version" from 1.14 to 1.15, the version that ubuntu 16.04 supports.
Configure/make/install

    ./configure CXXFLAGS="--std=c++11"
    make
    sudo make install

Configuring with these flags is important. If log4cplus is build without c++11 then athena will give linker errors while building.

At this point all library files and header files should be installed into /usr/local. (You may need to add /usr/local/lib to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH). You may also need to export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH variable set to /usr/local/include for the header files.

After installation, set USE_LOG4CPP flag to TRUE in the main CmakeLists.txt . The library doesn't initialize the log4cpp subsystem, including formats and appenders, it expects that the upper level application will do it and the log4cpp subsystem is already initialized.

(Optional) If you want to use Python test script

Install Python 3

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3

After the installation, please verify the version by running:

python3 --version

It should be

Python 3.x.x

(Optional) Only if using TLS as communication module

We use OpenSSL for TLS communication module. Please install it using

sudo apt-get install openssl libssl-dev

(Optional) Only if using TLS or plain TCP as communication module

We use Boost both for plain TCP and TLS communication. Please follow these instructions to install this library

Download Boost version 1.64

wget https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/release/1.64.0/source/boost_1_64_0.tar.gz

Unpack the archive

tar -xf boost_1_64_0.tar.gz

Build and install Boost (note that these commands will install only modules that are mandatory for building this project)

cd boost_1_64_0
./bootstrap.sh --with-libraries=system,filesystem
./b2
sudo ./b2 install

Select comm module

We support both UDP and TCP communication. UDP is the default. In order to enable TCP communication, build with -DBUILD_COMM_TCP_PLAIN=TRUE in the cmake instructions shown below. If set, the test client will run using TCP. If you wish to use TCP in your application, you need to build the TCP module as mentioned above and then create the communication object using CommFactory and passing PlainTcpConfig object to it.

We also support TCP over TLS communication. To enable it, change the BUILD_COMM_TCP_TLS flag to TRUE in the main CMakeLists.txt file. When running simpleTest using the testReplicasAndClient.sh - there is no need to create TLS certificates manually. The script will use the create_tls_certs.sh (located under the scripts/linux folder) to create certificates. The latter can be used to create TLS files for any number of replicas, e.g. when extending existing tests.

Build concord-bft

Create a build directory and enter it:

cd
mkdir -p concord-bft/build
cd concord-bft/build

To perform a default build execute the following:

cmake ..
make

In order to turn on or off various options, you need to change your cmake configuration. This is done by passing arguments to cmake with a -D prefix: e.g. cmake -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF. Note that make must be run afterwards to build according to the configuration. The following options are useful for building concord-bft:

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE - Debug | Release | RelWithDebInfo | MinSizeRel (DEFAULT Debug)
BUILD_TESTING - OFF | ON (DEFAULT ON)
BUILD_COMM_TCP_PLAIN - TRUE | FALSE (DEFAULT FALSE - UDP is used)
BUILD_COMM_TCP_TLS - TRUE | FALSE (DEFAULT FALSE - UDP is used)
USE_LOG4CPP - TRUE | FALSE (DEFAULT FALSE)
CONCORD_LOGGER_NAME - STRING (DEFAULT "concord")

Note: You can't set both BUILD_COMM_TCP_PLAIN and BUILD_COMM_TCP_TLS to TRUE.

(Optional) Python client

The python client is required for running tests. If you do not want to install python, you can configure the build of concord-bft by running cmake -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF .. from the build directory.

The python client requires python3(>= 3.5) and trio, which is installed via pip.

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade trio

Run examples

Simple test application (4 replicas and 1 client on a single machine)

Tests are compiled into in the build directory and can be run from anywhere as long as they aren't moved.

Run the following from the top level concord-bft directory:

./build/bftengine/tests/simpleTest/scripts/testReplicasAndClient.sh

Alternatively you can run runReplicas.sh and runClient.sh from the same directory as testReplicasAndClient.sh.

Using simple test application via Python script

You can use the simpleTest.py script to run various configurations via a simple command line interface. Please find more information here

no2chem / concord-bft