Chronos

Overview

This repository is the developing prototype of Hetu chronos, a general-propose message-passing framework which consider causality as first class citizen.

The chronos is a novel logical clock system designed for open networks with Byzantine participants, offering improved fault tolerance and performance. It introduces a customizable validator abstraction and has been successfully applied to develop decentralized applications with minimal overhead.

Layout & Toc

Chronos organization layout is as follows:

• crates/ the common dependences and core functional crates folder.
• demos/ some use cases of applied the Chronos and proposals.
• docs/ design and applied documents for demonstrating thoughts.
• src/ the source codebase of shared definitions and some common codes.

Features

The Chronos is a novel verifiable logical clock system that can target many problems that can't be handled by the regular logical clock.

Here are some core new features are provided by the Chronos:

• Programmable and verifiable vector logic clock
• Provides networks events causality partially order graph capability
• High-performance replication state machine with logical clock Byzantine fault tolerance
• Three verifiable warranties are provided: clock update proof, monotonicity proof, application-specific proof
• Three validation backends are supported: quorum certificate, trusted hardware (TEE), verifiable computation (ZKP)

Please refer to hetu key research for more details

Applied scenarios

Regular logical clock have been applied in many scenarios. As follows:

• Weakly consistent storage systems
  • Cops: Causal Consistency Data Storage
• Broadcast events with causally ordered
  • Reference: verifiable clock & p2p combined or optimizing
• Deadlock detection
  • Mutual exclusion of shared resources in a distributed system
  • Bakery algorithm
• Distributed snapshots
• Distributed system debugging.

For sure, the verifiable logical clock is an enhanced version of a regular logical clock that can do everything a regular clock can do.

Building

git clone https://github.com/hetu-project/chronos.git

cd chronos

cargo build

Contributing

We welcome all contributions! There are many ways to contribute to the project, including but not limited to:

• Cloning code repo and opening a PR.
• Submitting feature requests or bugs.
• Improving our product or contribution documentation.
• Contributing use cases to a feature request.

Contact

• Open an Issue
• Hetu Protocol
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