Related papers: Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Extended …
The success of blockchains has sparked interest in large-scale deployments of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols over wide area networks. A central feature of such networks is variable communication bandwidth across nodes…
Given that Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are plutocratic, and other common consensus protocols are mostly permission-based, we look for a consensus protocol that will suit the needs of e-Democracy. In particular, what we need…
A recent paper by Gupta et al. (EuroSys'23) challenged the usefulness of trusted component (TC) based Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols to lower the replica group size from $3f+1$ to $2f+1$, identifying three limitations of such…
Byzantine agreement protocols in asynchronous networks have received renewed interest because they do not rely on network behavior to achieve termination. Conventional asynchronous Byzantine agreement protocols require every party to…
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…
The HotStuff protocol is a breakthrough in Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus that enjoys both responsiveness and linear view change. It creatively adds an additional round to classic BFT protocols (like PBFT) using two rounds. This…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, the distributed systems community has shown interest in the design of efficient blockchain systems. However, initial blockchain applications (like Bitcoin) attain very low throughput, which has promoted the…
Existing research on federated learning has been focused on the setting where learning is coordinated by a centralized entity. Yet the greatest potential of future collaborative intelligence would be unleashed in a more open and…
Service replication distributes an application over many processes for tolerating faults, attacks, and misbehavior among a subset of the processes. The established state-machine replication paradigm inherently requires the application to be…
This work presents Information Theoretic HotStuff (IT-HS), a new optimally resilient protocol for solving Byzantine Agreement in partial synchrony with information theoretic security guarantees. In particular, IT-HS does not depend on any…
The publication of the pivotal state machine replication protocol PBFT laid the foundation for a large body of BFT protocols. While many successors to PBFT have been developed, there is no general technique to compare these protocols under…
Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted -- e.g., enterprise settings and government infrastructure. However, CFT consensus can be broken by even a single corrupt…
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise grade permissioned distributed ledger platform that offers modularity for a broad set of industry use cases. One modular component is a pluggable ordering service that establishes consensus on the order…
The recent surge in federated data management applications has brought forth concerns about the security of underlying data and the consistency of replicas in the presence of malicious attacks. A prominent solution in this direction is to…
Blockchain technology has been proposed as a new infrastructure technology for a wide variety of novel applications. Blockchains provide an immutable record of transactions, making them useful when business actors do not trust each other.…
Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…
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…
Byzantine reliable broadcast is a fundamental problem in distributed computing, which has been studied extensively over the past decades. State-of-the-art algorithms are predominantly based on the approach to share encoded fragments of the…
Modern distributed systems face growing security threats, as attackers continuously enhance their skills and vulnerabilities span across the entire system stack, from hardware to the application layer. In the system design phase, fault…
Every BFT consensus protocol uses collision-resistant hashes to compare validator state. Collision resistance destroys distance: two validators agreeing on 19 of 20 transactions produce unrelated hashes, indistinguishable from validators…