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It is impossible to solve the Byzantine consensus problem in an open network of $n$ participants if only $2n/3$ or less of them are correct. As blockchains need to solve consensus, one might think that blockchains need more than $2n/3$…
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…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
Distributed control systems require high reliability and availability guarantees despite often being deployed at the edge of network infrastructure. Edge computing resources are less secure and less reliable than centralized resources in…
Consensus protocols have traditionally been studied in a setting where all participants are known to each other from the start of the protocol execution. In the parlance of the 'blockchain' literature, this is referred to as the…
In this paper we analyze from the game theory point of view Byzantine Fault Tolerant blockchains when processes exhibit rational or Byzantine behavior. Our work is the first to model the Byzantine-consensus based blockchains as a committee…
This paper describes a simple and efficient Binary Byzantine faulty tolerant consensus algorithm using a weak round coordinator and the partial synchrony assumption to ensure liveness. In the algorithm, non-faulty nodes perform an initial…
Blockchain has recently attracted the attention of the industry due, in part, to its ability to automate asset transfers. It requires distributed participants to reach a consensus on a block despite the presence of malicious (a.k.a.…
The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from…
Modular methods to transform Byzantine consensus protocols into ones that are fast and communication efficient in the common cases are presented. Small and short protocol segments called layers are custom designed to optimize performance in…
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader…
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…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
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…
In this paper we present an open source, fully asynchronous, leaderless algorithm for reaching consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults in an asynchronous network. We prove the algorithm's correctness provided that less than a third of…
We present a general consensus framework that allows to easily introduce a customizable Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm to an existing (Delegated) Proof-of-Stake blockchain. We prove the safety of the protocol under the…