Quantum-resistant blockchain consensus with multiple proposers and no signatures
Quantum Cadence: Post-Quantum Consensus with Multiple Concurrent Proposers
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingCryptography and Security
Summary
Most blockchains rely on special cryptographic signatures that could be broken by future quantum computers, making secure agreement difficult. The authors present Quantum Cadence, a new blockchain consensus design that avoids using these risky signatures altogether by having validators count votes themselves. This approach keeps the system both safe and fast, even with many validators proposing blocks at once. Their tests show Quantum Cadence works well with hundreds of participants, maintaining low delays and good scaling.
What this means in practice
- •For blockchain platform engineers: Build quantum-resistant consensus protocols for large validator networks without relying on fragile signature aggregation.
- •For distributed system architects: Design fault-tolerant agreement systems that scale efficiently with many concurrent proposers and avoid signature overhead.
Authors
Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai, Tobias Klenze, Jovan Komatovic
Abstract
The consensus protocols of most high-performance blockchains use quorum certificates, which bundle the signatures of a quorum of validators. Signature schemes such as BLS can aggregate the signatures of a whole quorum into a single short signature, which keeps these certificates small. A large-scale quantum computer would break these schemes, and no post-quantum scheme with comparable aggregate size and aggregation time is known. Without aggregation, a certificate holds one large post-quantum signature per member of the quorum, so it becomes infeasible for each validator to broadcast certificates, as modern consensus protocols often require. We present Quantum Cadence, a post-quantum consensus protocol with multiple concurrent proposers that avoids certificates altogether: every validator counts quorums among the messages it has received itself. Its safety and liveness do not even depend on signatures, although we add signatures to obtain accountability. Quantum Cadence builds on Cadence and replaces its slot consensus, Chorus, with Quantum Chorus, which keeps the optimal fast-path latency of Chorus: dissemination followed by two rounds of votes. When its fast path fails, Quantum Chorus runs Coda, our signature-free Byzantine agreement for multiple proposers. We also outline how the Conductor, which schedules the slots of Cadence, can be adapted to Quantum Cadence. In simulations with 200 validators, Quantum Chorus has a latency comparable to that of Chorus and scales better with the number of proposers.