T-RBFT: A Scalable and Efficient Byzantine Consensus Based on Trusted Execution Environment for Consortium Blockchain

A team of researchers has introduced T-RBFT, a novel consensus protocol designed to solve the scalability bottleneck in consortium blockchains. Unlike public chains, consortium chains operate among known, vetted entities, meaning the threat model is less severe than the worst-case scenarios traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols are built for. These classic BFT protocols incur heavy communication overhead, limiting performance. T-RBFT addresses this by creating a two-layer architecture inspired by network sharding and enhanced by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), like Intel SGX, which provide secure, isolated enclaves for computation.

In the T-RBFT design, consensus nodes are first dynamically grouped. A TEE-assisted BFT protocol handles agreement between these groups, leveraging the security guarantees of TEEs to streamline the process. Within each group, a more lightweight, improved Raft-based mechanism achieves internal consensus. This hybrid approach significantly cuts down on the total number of messages that need to be exchanged across the entire network. Experimental evaluations show that T-RBFT reduces communication overhead and latency while achieving higher throughput compared to prior two-layer consensus protocols, making it a strong candidate for high-performance enterprise blockchain networks in finance, supply chain, and other permissioned settings.