Related papers: Obfuscated Consensus
The famous Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof shows that it is impossible to solve the consensus problem in a natural model of an asynchronous distributed system if even a single process can fail. Since its publication, two…
Consensus is a most fundamental task in distributed computing. This paper studies the consensus problem for a set of processes connected by a dynamic directed network, in which computation and communication is lock-step synchronous but…
Modern distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to build a fault-tolerant-core upon which they can build applications. Consensus protocols are correct under a specific failure model, where up to $f$ machines can fail. We argue that…
Fault-tolerant consensus is about reaching agreement on some of the input values in a limited time by non-faulty autonomous processes, despite of failures of processes or communication medium. This problem is particularly challenging and…
The Fischer-Lynch-Paterson theorem (FLP) says that it is impossible for processes in an asynchronous distributed system to achieve consensus on a binary value when a single process can fail; it is a widely cited theoretical result about…
The optimal space complexity of consensus in shared memory is a decades-old open problem. For a system of $n$ processes, no algorithm is known that uses a sublinear number of registers. However, the best known lower bound due to Fich,…
We study the consensus problem in a synchronous distributed system of $n$ nodes under an adaptive adversary that has a slightly outdated view of the system and can block all incoming and outgoing communication of a constant fraction of the…
A seminal result by Lamport shows that at least $\max\{2e+f+1,2f+1\}$ processes are required to implement partially synchronous consensus that tolerates $f$ process failures and can furthermore decide in two message delays under $e$…
Consensus is arguably the most studied problem in distributed computing as a whole, and particularly in the distributed message-passing setting. In this latter framework, research on consensus has considered various hypotheses regarding the…
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…
We demonstrate termination of binary consensus under the model and conditions used by Fischer, Lynch, and Patterson (FLP) to prove impossibility of binary agreement - in complete asynchrony and a possible process crash - in two steps.…
Consensus is one of the most thoroughly studied problems in distributed computing, yet there are still complexity gaps that have not been bridged for decades. In particular, in the classical message-passing setting with processes' crashes,…
The Fischer--Lynch--Paterson (FLP) impossibility result is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental negative results in distributed computing: no deterministic protocol can guarantee consensus in an asynchronous system with even one…
The bounded storage model restricts the memory of an adversary in a cryptographic protocol, rather than restricting its computational power, making information theoretically secure protocols feasible. We present the first protocols for…
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…
The safe-consensus task was introduced by Afek, Gafni and Lieber (DISC' 09) as a weakening of the classic consensus. When there is concurrency, the consensus output can be arbitrary, not even the input of any process. They showed that…
The paper proposes an alternative proof that Omega, an oracle that outputs a process identifier and guarantees that eventually the same correct process identifier is output at all correct processes, provides minimal information about…
Population protocols are a fundamental model in distributed computing, where many nodes with bounded memory and computational power have random pairwise interactions over time. This model has been studied in a rich body of literature aiming…
The deterministic (timing) behavior of real-time systems (RTS) can be used by adversaries - say, to launch side channel attacks or even destabilize the system by denying access to critical resources. We propose a protocol (named REORDER) to…
Multi-agent consensus problems can often be seen as a sequence of autonomous and independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared goal of achieving a…