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Consensus in decentralized systems that asynchronously receive events and which are subject to Byzantine faults is a common problem with many real-life applications. Advances in decentralized systems, such as distributed ledger (i.e.,…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
This paper introduces a new way to incorporate verifiable secret sharing (VSS) schemes into Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols. This technique extends the threshold guarantee of classical Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithms to…
Despite broad use of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance is weak: leaders can exclude transactions, a growing concern for trading and DeFi. We address this by introducing a new abstraction and protocol stack. First, we…
We present TRAIL: an algorithm that uses a novel consensus procedure to tolerate failed or malicious shards within a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Our algorithm takes a new approach of selecting validator shards for each transaction from…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), when managed by a few trusted validators, require most but not all of the machinery available in public DLTs. In this work, we explore one possible way to profit from this state of affairs. We devise…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation…
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…
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…
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
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…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) is an important building block for constructing permissioned blockchain systems. In contrast to Nakamoto Consensus where any block obtains higher assurance as buried deeper in…
The performance of partially synchronous BFT-based consensus protocols is highly dependent on the primary node. All participant nodes in the network are blocked until they receive a proposal from the primary node to begin the consensus…
Lower bounds and impossibility results in distributed computing are both intellectually challenging and practically important. Hundreds if not thousands of proofs appear in the literature, but surprisingly, the vast majority of them apply…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications. However, individual LLMs often produce inconsistent, biased, or hallucinated outputs due to limitations in their training corpora and model…
Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols have garnered significant attention with the rise of blockchain technology. A typical asynchronous protocol is designed by executing sequential instances of the Asynchronous…
Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give…