Brief Announcement: Revisiting Consensus Protocols through Wait-Free Parallelization

In this brief announcement, we propose a protocol-agnostic approach to improve the design of primary-backup consensus protocols. At the core of our approach is a novel wait-free design of running several instances of the underlying consensus protocol in parallel. To yield a high-performance parallelized design, we present coordination-free techniques to order operations across parallel instances, deal with instance failures, and assign clients to specific instances. Consequently, the design we present is able to reduce the load on individual instances and primaries, while also reducing the adverse effects of any malicious replicas. Our design is fine-tuned such that the instances coordinated by non-faulty replicas are wait-free: they can continuously make consensus decisions, independent of the behavior of any other instances

The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures, e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design dimensions from infrastructure settings such as the communication topology, to more technical features such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social choice properties like order-fairness. The proliferation of different BFT protocols has rendered it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocols design, analysis, implementation, and experiments. Bedrock proposes a design space consisting of a set of design choices capturing the trade-offs between different design space dimensions and providing fundamentally new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of BFT protocols. Bedrock enables users to analyze and experiment with BFT protocols within the space of plausible choices, evolve current protocols to design new ones, and even uncover previously unknown protocols. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of Bedrock to uniformly evaluate BFT protocols in new ways that were not possible before due to the diverse assumptions made by these protocols. The results validate Bedrock's ability to analyze and derive BFT protocols