Tame the Wild with Byzantine Linearizability: Reliable Broadcast, Snapshots, and Asset Transfer

We formalize Byzantine linearizability, a correctness condition that specifies whether a concurrent object with a sequential specification is resilient against Byzantine failures. Using this definition, we systematically study Byzantine-tolerant emulations of various objects from registers. We focus on three useful objects- reliable broadcast, atomic snapshot, and asset transfer. We prove that there exist n-process f-resilient Byzantine linearizable implementations of such objects from registers if and only if f < n/2

Reconfigurable Lattice Agreement and Applications

Reconfiguration is one of the central mechanisms in distributed systems. Due to failures and connectivity disruptions, the very set of service replicas (or servers) and their roles in the computation may have to be reconfigured over time. To provide the desired level of consistency and availability to applications running on top of these servers, the clients of the service should be able to reach some form of agreement on the system configuration. We observe that this agreement is naturally captured via a lattice partial order on the system states. We propose an asynchronous implementation of reconfigurable lattice agreement that implies elegant reconfigurable versions of a large class of lattice abstract data types, such as max-registers and conflict detectors, as well as popular distributed programming abstractions, such as atomic snapshot and commit-adopt

Brief Announcement: Wait-Free Universality of Consensus in the Infinite Arrival Model

In classical asynchronous distributed systems composed of a fixed number n of processes where some proportion may fail by crashing, many objects do not have a wait-free linearizable implementation (e.g. stacks, queues, etc.). It has been proved that consensus is universal in such systems, which means that this system augmented with consensus objects allows to implement any object that has a sequential specification. In this paper, we consider a more general system model called infinite arrival model where infinitely many processes may arrive and leave or crash during a run. We prove that consensus is still universal in this more general model. For that, we propose a universal construction based on a weak log that can be implementated using consensus objects

Task Computability in Unreliable Anonymous Networks

We consider the anonymous broadcast model: a set of n anonymous processes communicate via send-to-all primitives. We assume that underlying communication channels are asynchronous but reliable, and that the processes are subject to crash failures. We show first that in this model, even a single faulty process precludes implementations of atomic objects with non-commuting operations, even as simple as read-write registers or add-only sets. We, however, show that a sequentially consistent read-write memory and add-only sets can be implemented t-resiliently for t<n/2, i.e., provided that a majority of the processes do not fail. We use this implementation to establish an equivalence between the t-resilient read-write anonymous shared-memory model and the t-resilient anonymous broadcast model in terms of colorless task solvability. As a result, we obtain the first task computability characterization for unreliable anonymous message-passing systems

On the robustness of Herlihy's hierarchy

A wait-free hierarchy maps object types to levels in Z(+) U (infinity) and has the following property: if a type T is at level N, and T' is an arbitrary type, then there is a wait-free implementation of an object of type T', for N processes, using only registers and objects of type T. The infinite hierarchy defined by Herlihy is an example of a wait-free hierarchy. A wait-free hierarchy is robust if it has the following property: if T is at level N, and S is a finite set of types belonging to levels N - 1 or lower, then there is no wait-free implementation of an object of type T, for N processes, using any number and any combination of objects belonging to the types in S. Robustness implies that there are no clever ways of combining weak shared objects to obtain stronger ones. Contrary to what many researchers believe, we prove that Herlihy's hierarchy is not robust. We then define some natural variants of Herlihy's hierarchy, which are also infinite wait-free hierarchies. With the exception of one, which is still open, these are not robust either. We conclude with the open question of whether non-trivial robust wait-free hierarchies exist