Anole: reconfiguration-based protocol for dynamic asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance

Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocols are widely used in permissioned blockchain systems to ensure data consistency and reliability. However, traditional Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) protocols are typically designed for static membership, where the consensus node set remains fixed. This static design makes dynamic node admission, departure, and exclusion difficult, since membership changes usually require costly system-wide reconfiguration and may interrupt normal consensus operation. Moreover, existing ABFT protocols provide limited support for evidence-based handling of suspected inactive or faulty nodes, which restricts their applicability in dynamic permissioned environments.To address these challenges, this paper presents Anole, a reconfiguration-based protocol for dynamic Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Anole supports certificate-based Join, Leave, and Complain operations while preserving the ordinary transaction-consensus path under the current membership. Instead of relying on an external single trusted third party, Anole uses a replicated Byzantine-fault-tolerant Supervisor Committee (SC) to handle certificate issuance and key-management requests. The ordinary transaction-consensus path combines dynamic threshold public-key encryption with Bracha’s local-coin ABA under an asynchronous network model, while the current PBFT-based Supervisor Committee implementation is treated as a low-frequency management path whose liveness relies on partial synchrony. We evaluate Anole against HoneyBadgerBFT, Dumbo, and HotStuff in LAN and WAN deployments of up to 31 nodes, reporting both consensus latency and derived throughput under a fixed batch size. The results show that Anole provides dynamic-membership support with competitive consensus performance.