1,607 research outputs found
Generalized Paxos Made Byzantine (and Less Complex)
One of the most recent members of the Paxos family of protocols is
Generalized Paxos. This variant of Paxos has the characteristic that it departs
from the original specification of consensus, allowing for a weaker safety
condition where different processes can have a different views on a sequence
being agreed upon. However, much like the original Paxos counterpart,
Generalized Paxos does not have a simple implementation. Furthermore, with the
recent practical adoption of Byzantine fault tolerant protocols, it is timely
and important to understand how Generalized Paxos can be implemented in the
Byzantine model. In this paper, we make two main contributions. First, we
provide a description of Generalized Paxos that is easier to understand, based
on a simpler specification and the pseudocode for a solution that can be
readily implemented. Second, we extend the protocol to the Byzantine fault
model
Scalable Byzantine Reliable Broadcast
Byzantine reliable broadcast is a powerful primitive that allows a set of processes to agree on a message from a designated sender, even if some processes (including the sender) are Byzantine. Existing broadcast protocols for this setting scale poorly, as they typically build on quorum systems with strong intersection guarantees, which results in linear per-process communication and computation complexity.
We generalize the Byzantine reliable broadcast abstraction to the probabilistic setting, allowing each of its properties to be violated with a fixed, arbitrarily small probability. We leverage these relaxed guarantees in a protocol where we replace quorums with stochastic samples. Compared to quorums, samples are significantly smaller in size, leading to a more scalable design. We obtain the first Byzantine reliable broadcast protocol with logarithmic per-process communication and computation complexity.
We conduct a complete and thorough analysis of our protocol, deriving bounds on the probability of each of its properties being compromised. During our analysis, we introduce a novel general technique that we call adversary decorators. Adversary decorators allow us to make claims about the optimal strategy of the Byzantine adversary without imposing any additional assumptions. We also introduce Threshold Contagion, a model of message propagation through a system with Byzantine processes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal analysis of a probabilistic broadcast protocol in the Byzantine fault model. We show numerically that practically negligible failure probabilities can be achieved with realistic security parameters
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