Related papers: Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too!
We consider \emph{plurality consensus} in a network of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node has one of $k$ opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the…
Ensuring the correctness of distributed system implementations remains a challenging and largely unaddressed problem. In this paper we present a protocol that can be used to certify the safety of consensus implementations. Our proposed…
The robustness of distributed systems is usually phrased in terms of the number of failures of certain types that they can withstand. However, these failure models are too crude to describe the different kinds of trust and expectations of…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
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…
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…
We study implementations of basic fault-tolerant primitives, such as consensus and registers, in message-passing systems subject to process crashes and a broad range of communication failures. Our results characterize the necessary and…
Supercomputing systems today often come in the form of large numbers of commodity systems linked together into a computing cluster. These systems, like any distributed system, can have large numbers of independent hardware components…
In this paper, we propose a modularized framework for communication processes applicable to crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. We abstract basic communication components and show that the communication process of the…
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) are essential for interpreting black-box models, yet they often become invalid when models are slightly changed. Existing methods for generating robust CFEs are often limited to specific types of models,…
Distributed consensus, the ability to reach agreement in the face of failures and asynchrony, is a fundamental primitive for constructing reliable distributed systems from unreliable components. The Paxos algorithm is synonymous with…
We review probabilistic models known as majority dynamics (also known as threshold Voter Models) and discuss their possible applications for achieving consensus in cryptocurrency systems. In particular, we show that using this approach…
Randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols with common coins are widely used in cloud computing and blockchain platforms. Due to their fundamental role, it is vital to guarantee their correctness. Threshold automata is a formal model…
Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms are central for building reliable spatially distributed systems. Unfortunately, the lack of a canonical precise framework for fault-tolerant algorithms is an obstacle for both verification and…
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…
Agreement among a set of processes and in the presence of partial failures is one of the fundamental problems of distributed systems. In the most general case, many decisions must be agreed upon over the lifetime of a system with…
The consensus problem, briefly stated, consists of having processes in an asynchronous distributed system agree on a value. It is widely known that the consensus problem does not have a deterministic solution that ensures both termination…
We propose consensus propagation, an asynchronous distributed protocol for averaging numbers across a network. We establish convergence, characterize the convergence rate for regular graphs, and demonstrate that the protocol exhibits better…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…