NDSS 2025 – Mysticeti: Reaching The Latency Limits With Uncertified DAGs
Session 7A: Network Security 2
Authors, Creators & Presenters: Kushal Babel (Cornell Tech & IC3), Andrey Chursin (Mysten Labs), George Danezis (Mysten Labs & University College London (UCL)), Anastasios Kichidis (Mysten Labs), Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (Mysten Labs & IST Austria), Arun Koshy (Mysten Labs), Alberto Sonnino (Mysten Labs & University College London (UCL)), Mingwei Tian (Mysten Labs)
PAPER
Mysticeti: Reaching The Latency Limits With Uncertified DAGs
We introduce Mysticeti-C, the first DAG-based Byzantine consensus protocol to achieve the lower bounds of latency of 3 message rounds. Since Mysticeti-C is built over DAGs it also achieves high resource efficiency and censorship resistance. Mysticeti-C achieves this latency improvement by avoiding explicit certification of the DAG blocks and by proposing a novel commit rule such that every block can be committed without delays, resulting in optimal latency in the steady state and under crash failures. We further extend Mysticeti-C to Mysticeti-FPC, which incorporates a fast commit path that achieves even lower latency for transferring assets. Unlike prior fast commit path protocols, Mysticeti-FPC minimizes the number of signatures and messages by weaving the fast path transactions into the DAG. This frees up resources, which subsequently result in better performance. We prove the safety and liveness in a Byzantine context. We evaluate both Mysticeti protocols and compare them with state-of-the-art consensus and fast path protocols to demonstrate their low latency and resource efficiency, as well as their more graceful degradation under crash failures. Mysticeti-C is the first Byzantine consensus protocol to achieve WAN latency of 0.5s for consensus commit while simultaneously maintaining state-of-the-art throughput of over 100k TPS. Finally, we report on integrating Mysticeti-C as the consensus protocol into a major deployed blockchain, resulting in over 4x latency reduction.
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The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.
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