Related papers: Quorum Tree Abstractions of Consensus Protocols
A fundamental conflict of many proof-of-work systems is that they want to achieve inclusiveness and security at the same time. We analyze and resolve this conflict with a theory of proof-of-work quorums, which enables a new bridge between…
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
This paper introduces a deterministic Byzantine consensus algorithm that relies on a new weak coordinator. As opposed to previous algorithms that cannot terminate in the presence of a faulty or slow coordinator, our algorithm can terminate…
Consensus algorithms provide strategies to solve problems in a distributed system with the added constraint that data can only be shared between adjacent computing nodes. We find these algorithms in applications for wireless and sensor…
We present efficient and practical algorithms for a large, distributed system of processors to achieve reliable computations in a secure manner. Specifically, we address the problem of computing a general function of several private inputs…
In this paper, we present a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed commit protocol for transactions running over untrusted networks. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is enhanced by replicating the coordinator and by running a…
The practical Byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) consensus protocol is one of the basic consensus protocols in the development of blockchain technology. At the same time, the PBFT consensus protocol forms a basis for some other important BFT…
Permissioned blockchains employ Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) to reach agreement on an ever-growing, linearly ordered log of transactions. A new paradigm, combined with decades of research in BFT SMR and…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
Fail-prone systems, and their quorum systems, are useful tools for the design of distributed algorithms. However, fail-prone systems as studied so far require every process to know the full system membership in order to guarantee safety…
Quorum systems are useful tools for implementing consistent and available storage in the presence of failures. These systems usually comprise a static set of servers that provide a fault-tolerant read/write register accessed by a set of…
We present a novel mathematical framework for the specification and analysis of fault-resilient distributed protocols and their implementations, with the following components: 1. Transition systems that allow the specification and analysis…
Consensus is a common method for computing a function of the data distributed among the nodes of a network. Of particular interest is distributed average consensus, whereby the nodes iteratively compute the sample average of the data stored…
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
More than two decades ago, combinatorial topology was shown to be useful for analyzing distributed fault-tolerant algorithms in shared memory systems and in message passing systems. In this work, we show that combinatorial topology can also…
Leader election is a crucial process in many areas such as cloud computing, distributed systems, task orchestration, and blockchain. Oftentimes, in a distributed system, the network needs to choose a leader, which would be responsible for…
We propose a new distributed-computing model, inspired by permissionless distributed systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that allows studying permissionless consensus in a mathematically regular setting. Like in the sleepy model of Pass…