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Tiny Groups Tackle Byzantine Adversaries
A popular technique for tolerating malicious faults in open distributed
systems is to establish small groups of participants, each of which has a
non-faulty majority. These groups are used as building blocks to design
attack-resistant algorithms.
Despite over a decade of active research, current constructions require group
sizes of , where is the number of participants in the system.
This group size is important since communication and state costs scale
polynomially with this parameter. Given the stubbornness of this logarithmic
barrier, a natural question is whether better bounds are possible.
Here, we consider an attacker that controls a constant fraction of the total
computational resources in the system. By leveraging proof-of-work (PoW), we
demonstrate how to reduce the group size exponentially to while
maintaining strong security guarantees. This reduction in group size yields a
significant improvement in communication and state costs.Comment: This work is supported by the National Science Foundation grant CCF
1613772 and a C Spire Research Gif
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