On the number of authenticated rounds in Byzantine agreement

Byzantine Agreement requires a set of nodes in a distributed system to agree on the message of a sender despite the presence of arbitrarily faulty nodes. Solutions for this problem are generally divided into two classes: authenticated protocols and non-authenticated protocols. In the former class, all messages are (digitally) signed and can be assigned to their respective signers, while in the latter no messages are signed. Authenticated protocols can tolerate an arbitrary number of faults, while non-authenticated protocols require more than two thirds of the nodes to be correct. In this paper, we investigate the fault tolerance of protocols that require signatures in a certain number of communication rounds only. We show that a protocol that is to tolerate one half of the nodes as faulty needs only few authenticated rounds (logarithmic in the number of nodes), while tolerating more faults requires about two authenticated rounds per additional faulty node

Byzantine Lattice Agreement in Asynchronous Systems

We study the Byzantine lattice agreement (BLA) problem in asynchronous distributed message passing systems. In the BLA problem, each process proposes a value from a join semi-lattice and needs to output a value also in the lattice such that all output values of correct processes lie on a chain despite the presence of Byzantine processes. We present an algorithm for this problem with round complexity of O(log f) which tolerates f < n/5 Byzantine failures in the asynchronous setting without digital signatures, where n is the number of processes. This is the first algorithm which has logarithmic round complexity for this problem in asynchronous setting. Before our work, Di Luna et al give an algorithm for this problem which takes O(f) rounds and tolerates f < n/3 Byzantine failures. We also show how this algorithm can be modified to work in the authenticated setting (i.e., with digital signatures) to tolerate f < n/3 Byzantine failures

On the Round Complexity of Randomized Byzantine Agreement

We prove lower bounds on the round complexity of randomized Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols, bounding the halting probability of such protocols after one and two rounds. In particular, we prove that: 1) BA protocols resilient against n/3 [resp., n/4] corruptions terminate (under attack) at the end of the first round with probability at most o(1) [resp., 1/2+ o(1)]. 2) BA protocols resilient against n/4 corruptions terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most 1-Theta(1). 3) For a large class of protocols (including all BA protocols used in practice) and under a plausible combinatorial conjecture, BA protocols resilient against n/3 [resp., n/4] corruptions terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most o(1) [resp., 1/2 + o(1)]. The above bounds hold even when the parties use a trusted setup phase, e.g., a public-key infrastructure (PKI). The third bound essentially matches the recent protocol of Micali (ITCS\u2717) that tolerates up to n/3 corruptions and terminates at the end of the third round with constant probability

Tight Bounds for Connectivity and Set Agreement in Byzantine Synchronous Systems

In this paper, we show that the protocol complex of a Byzantine synchronous system can remain $(k - 1)$-connected for up to $\lceil t/k \rceil$ rounds, where $t$ is the maximum number of Byzantine processes, and $t \ge k \ge 1$. This topological property implies that $\lceil t/k \rceil + 1$ rounds are necessary to solve $k$-set agreement in Byzantine synchronous systems, compared to $\lfloor t/k \rfloor + 1$ rounds in synchronous crash-failure systems. We also show that our connectivity bound is tight as we indicate solutions to Byzantine $k$-set agreement in exactly $\lceil t/k \rceil + 1$ synchronous rounds, at least when $n$ is suitably large compared to $t$. In conclusion, we see how Byzantine failures can potentially require one extra round to solve $k$-set agreement, and, for $n$ suitably large compared to $t$, at most that

Interactive Consistency Algorithms Based on Voting and Error-Correding Codes

This paper presents a new class of synchronous deterministic non authenticated algorithms for reaching interactive consistency (Byzantine agreement). The algorithms are based on voting and error correcting codes and require considerably less data communication than the original algorithm, whereas the number of rounds and the number of modules meet the minimum bounds. These algorithms based on voting and coding are defined and proved on the basis of a class of algorithms, called the dispersed joined communication algorithm