Consensus protocols play a crucial role in determining the security and performance of blockchain systems, with committee-based consensus protocols being particularly important, especially in sharding consensus protocols. Anonymous election of committee nodes can mitigate DDoS attacks and bribery attempts. This approach can also be applied to sharding systems to mitigate the risk associated with a single vulnerable shard. However, current node secret selection schemes still present remaining issues. Single secret leader election schemes struggle to elect multiple leaders with equal anonymity, and existing secret committee election schemes lack adequate measures for tracking malicious nodes. To address these issues, we propose accountable secret committee election schemes that not only regulate the number of nodes but also maintain anonymity during the phases of leader proposal and verifier voting. Furthermore, our schemes enable the tracing of malicious nodes in a threshold way. In addition, we introduce two efficient threshold traceable membership proof schemes for both ad hoc and interactive scenarios. Unlike traceable ring signatures, our scheme can trace malicious nodes even after a single malicious behavior. Subsequently, we apply the accountable secret committee election scheme to sharding blockchains and devise a fully accountable anonymous consensus protocol. The experiment demonstrates that this protocol can elevate the difficulty of corrupting a single shard to the level of compromising the entire system, thereby significantly enhancing the security of the sharding system.

Random beacons play a crucial role in blockchains. Most random beacons in a blockchain are performed in a distributed approach to secure the generation of random numbers. However, blockchain nodes are in an open environment and are vulnerable to adversary reboot attacks. After such an attack, the number of members involved in a random number generation decreases. The random numbers generated by the system become insecure. To solve this problem while guaranteeing fast recovery of capabilities, we designed a threshold signature scheme based on share recovery. A bivariate polynomial was generated among the participants in the distributed key generation phase. While preserving the threshold signature key share, it can also help participants who lost their shares to recover. The same threshold setting for signing and recovery guarantees the security of the system. The results of our scheme show that we take an acceptable time overhead in distributed key generation and simultaneously enrich the share recovery functionality for the threshold signature-based random number generation scheme.

With the increasing demand for privacy protection in the blockchain, the universal zero-knowledge proof protocol has been developed and widely used. Because hash function is an important cryptographic primitive in a blockchain, the zero-knowledge proof of hash preimage has a wide range of application scenarios. However, it is hard to implement it due to the transformation of efficiency and execution complexity. Currently, there are only zero-knowledge proof circuits of some widely used hash functions that have been implemented, such as SHA256. SM3 is a Chinese hash function standard published by the Chinese Commercial Cryptography Administration Office for the use of electronic authentication service systems, and hence might be used in several cryptographic applications in China. As the national cryptographic hash function standard, the zero-knowledge proof circuit of SM3 (Chinese Commercial Cryptography) has not been implemented. Therefore, this paper analyzed the SM3 algorithm process, designed a new layered circuit structure, and implemented the SM3 hash preimage zero-knowledge proof circuit with a circuit size reduced by half compared to the automatic generator. Moreover, we proposed several extended practical protocols based on the SM3 zero-knowledge proof circuit, which is widely used in blockchain.