Related papers: Invited Paper: Failure is (literally) an Option: A…
In distributed transaction processing, atomic commit protocol (ACP) is used to ensure database consistency. With the use of commodity compute nodes and networks, failures such as system crashes and network partitioning are common. It is…
Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus is a fundamental primitive for distributed computation. However, BFT protocols suffer from the ordering manipulation, in which an adversary can make front-running. Several protocols are proposed to…
Blockchain promises to make online services more fault tolerant due to their inherent distributed nature. Their ability to execute arbitrary programs in different geo-distributed regions and on diverse operating systems make them an…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
The paper presents Tendermint, a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions. More commonly known as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus or atomic broadcast, the problem has attracted…
Trust is the basis of any distributed, fault-tolerant, or secure system. A trust assumption specifies the failures that a system, such as a blockchain network, can tolerate and determines the conditions under which it operates correctly. In…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been proposed to tolerate malicious behaviors in state machine replications. With classic BFT protocols, the total number of replicas is known and fixed a priori. The resilience of BFT…
Modern distributed data management systems face a new challenge: how can autonomous, mutually-distrusting parties cooperate safely and effectively? Addressing this challenge brings up questions familiar from classical distributed systems:…
The idle computers on a local area, campus area, or even wide area network represent a significant computational resource---one that is, however, also unreliable, heterogeneous, and opportunistic. This type of resource has been used…
Quantum Byzantine Agreement (QBA), a cornerstone of quantum blockchain, offers inherent advantages in security and fault tolerance over classical protocols, guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. However, existing multiparty QBA…
The so-called blockchain trilemma asserts the impossibility of simultaneously achieving scalability, security, and decentralisation within a single blockchain protocol. In this paper, we formally refute that proposition. Employing predicate…
Byzantine consensus is a critical component in many permissioned Blockchains and distributed ledgers. We propose a new paradigm for designing BFT protocols called DQBFT that addresses three major performance and scalability challenges that…
Ensuring that an AI system behaves reliably and as intended, especially in the presence of unexpected faults or adversarial conditions, is a complex challenge. Inspired by the field of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) from distributed…
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
Most of the Blockchain permissioned systems employ Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to ensure that honest validators agree on the order for appending entries to their ledgers. In this paper, we study the performance and…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
Modern distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to build a fault-tolerant-core upon which they can build applications. Consensus protocols are correct under a specific failure model, where up to $f$ machines can fail. We argue that…
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures, e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design…