Related papers: Quorum Tree Abstractions of Consensus Protocols
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Fault-tolerant consensus has been studied extensively in the literature, because it is one of the most important distributed primitives and has wide applications in practice. This paper surveys important results on fault-tolerant consensus…
The distributed transaction commit problem requires reaching agreement on whether a transaction is committed or aborted. The classic Two-Phase Commit protocol blocks if the coordinator fails. Fault-tolerant consensus algorithms also reach…
Permissioned Blockchains are increasingly considered in enterprise use-cases, many of which do not require geo-distribution, or even disallow it due to legislation. Examples include country-wide networks, such as Alastria, or those deployed…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus exhibits higher throughput in comparison to Proof of Work (PoW) in blockchains. But BFT-based protocols suffer from scalability problems with respect to the number of replicas in the network. The…
Quorum systems are a common way to formalize failure assumptions in distributed systems. Traditionally, these assumptions are shared by all involved processes. More recently, systems have emerged which allow processes some freedom in…
Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need…
In this paper, we propose a modularized framework for communication processes applicable to crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. We abstract basic communication components and show that the communication process of the…
Distributed consensus is a key enabler for many distributed systems including distributed databases and blockchains. Canopus is a scalable distributed consensus protocol that ensures that live nodes in a system agree on an ordered sequence…
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies rely on distributed consensus algorithms. In recent years many consensus algorithms and protocols have been proposed; most of them are for permissioned blockchain networks. However, the…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online voting…
In contrast to proof-of-work replication, Byzantine quorum systems maintain consistency across replicas with higher throughput modest energy consumption, and deterministic liveness guarantees. If complemented with heterogeneous trust and…
Consensus protocols for asynchronous networks are usually complex and inefficient, leading practical systems to rely on synchronous protocols. This paper attempts to simplify asynchronous consensus by building atop a novel threshold logical…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
We consider \emph{plurality consensus} in a network of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node has one of $k$ opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the…
Distributed architectures are used to improve performance and reliability of various systems. Examples include drone swarms and load-balancing servers. An important capability of a distributed architecture is the ability to reach consensus…
Blockchain is a type of decentralized distributed network which acts as an immutable digital ledger. Despite the absence of any central governing authority to validate the blocks in the ledger, it is considered secure and immutable due to…