Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

Abstract

We introduce Themis, a scheme for introducing fair ordering of transactions into (permissioned) Byzantine consensus protocols with at most f faulty nodes among n ≥ 4f + 1. Themis enforces the strongest notion of fair ordering proposed to date. It also achieves standard liveness, rather than the weaker notion of previous work with the same fair ordering property. We show experimentally that Themis can be integrated into state-of-the-art consensus protocols with minimal modification or performance overhead. Additionally, we introduce a suite of experiments of general interest for evaluating the practical strength of various notions of fair ordering and the resilience of fair-ordering protocols to adversarial manipulation. We use this suite of experiments to show that the notion of fair ordering enforced by Themis is stronger in practice than those of competing systems. We believe Themis offers strong practical protection against many types of transaction-ordering attacks-such as front-running and back-running-that are currently impacting commonly used smart contract systems.