In recent years, blockchain has been increasingly applied to authoritative institutions (i.e., authoritative blockchains) to strengthen their authority and reputation by providing reliable and secure data to increase transparency, reducing fraud, and enhancing efficiency for distributed applications (DApps) like electronics certificate, land registration, and e-voting, etc. Blockchain systems in these scenarios often have the features of small node-size, high node-reputation and high node-performance, e.g., government blockchains. However, as one of the core technologies of blockchain, distributed consensus protocols are often designed for large-scale business DApps; their efficiency can be further improved when applied to authoritative blockchains. In this paper, taking into account the essential features of blockchain applications for institutions like government departments, we propose a consensus protocol known as Flying Blocks (FB) to further enhances the efficiency and practicality. FB combines the advantages of the delayed confirmation from Nakamoto consensus with the traditional voting-based BFT consensus to simplify the consensus process and reduce the network resources consumption. To evaluate the protocol's performance, we conduct comparison experiments with Hotstuff and RAFT. The results demonstrate that FB outperforms Hotstuff. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, FB is the first BFT protocol that outperforms RAFT, a CFT consensus protocol, deployed in Blockchain systems in terms of transaction processing efficiency.

With the continuous development of Serverless Computing, Serverless applications composed of multiple finegrained functions have been widely applied in various fields of real life. As a pre-defined logical abstraction of Serverless applications, Serverless Workflow describes the dependencies and data flow between functions, and is the mainstream paradigm of modern Serverless Computing. However, our investigation shows that traditional Master-Worker-based, function-granular Serverless Workflow Management Systems are no longer suitable for the multi-function composition and unpredictable high concurrency characteristics of current Serverless Workflow. The seemingly insignificant scheduling overhead of Serverless Workflows has become a non-trivial factor affecting the execution efficiency and scalability of Serverless Workflows. Therefore, we proposed a workflow-granular management paradigm and decentralized control to address these challenges. Following these methodologies, we implement Octopus to enable efficient workflow scheduling and execution across different levels of concurrency and cluster scales. Experiments indicate that, in high-concurrency environments, Octopus achieves up to a 90× reduction in scheduling overhead and can enhance execution efficiency by 7.5×. As the cluster size increases, Octopus shows acceptable overhead and high scalability.

Secure execution of smart contracts on consortium blockchains is essential. Existing solutions commonly use trusted execution environments (TEEs) to ensure isolated and confidential contract execution, enhancing security. However, these methods have limitations, such as resource constraints in TEEs, difficulties in supporting various smart contract programming languages, and potential expansion of the TEE’s attack surface. The use of TEE-based integrity measurement for smart contracts offers a viable solution to this problem. However, the challenges of analyzing the scope of integrity attacks must be addressed, determining the object and timing of integrity measurements, and ensuring trust transfer within the contract invocation chain. We study the integrity of consortium blockchain contracts using TEE and establish a smart contract integrity model for the endorsement policy. Furthermore, we propose Tipcc, an integrity measurement framework that combines static system components and dynamic user contracts using TEE. Tipcc ensures integrity measurement and verification throughout the contract lifecycle, providing trusted transmission along the invocation chain. Prototype system validation and simulation experiments using Hyperledger Fabric revealed that this approach improves transaction security while maintaining availability, exhibiting a performance overhead of approximately 7%.

Compared with public blockchain, consortium blockchain is more secure and controllable deployed in an enterprise scenario. Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus is widely applied in consortium blockchain. Although PBFT is the most classic practical BFT consensus with message complexity O(n2), it still faces some security threats and has low consensus efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a secure and trusted BFT (S2BFT) consensus based on trusted committees. S2BFT generates a trusted anonymous number using trust execution environment (TEE) for each server node and selects committees by pseudo-random algorithm. S2BFT can efficiently reach consensus by the committees with an O(m*n) message complexity. In addition, correctness analysis proves that S2BFT can resist more attacks than traditional BFT consensus and tolerate 1/2 byzantine server nodes. Results further demonstrate the efficiency of the simulated S2BFT implementation.