DAMYSUS: streamlined BFT consensus leveraging trusted components

Recently, streamlined Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, such as HotStuff, have been proposed as a means to circumvent the inefficient view-changes of traditional BFT protocols, such as PBFT. Several works have detailed trusted components, and BFT protocols that leverage them to tolerate a minority of faulty nodes and use a reduced number of communication rounds. Inspired by these works we identify two basic trusted services, respectively called the Checker and Accumulator services, which can be leveraged by streamlined protocols. Based on these services, we design Damysus, a streamlined protocol that improves upon HotStuff's resilience and uses less communication rounds. In addition, we show how the Checker and Accumulator services can be adapted to develop Chained-Damysus, a chained version of Damysus where operations are pipelined for efficiency. We prove the correctness of Damysus and Chained-Damysus, and evaluate their performance showcasing their superiority compared to previous protocols.