3,671 research outputs found
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
Optimal Error Rates for Interactive Coding I: Adaptivity and Other Settings
We consider the task of interactive communication in the presence of
adversarial errors and present tight bounds on the tolerable error-rates in a
number of different settings.
Most significantly, we explore adaptive interactive communication where the
communicating parties decide who should speak next based on the history of the
interaction. Braverman and Rao [STOC'11] show that non-adaptively one can code
for any constant error rate below 1/4 but not more. They asked whether this
bound could be improved using adaptivity. We answer this open question in the
affirmative (with a slightly different collection of resources): Our adaptive
coding scheme tolerates any error rate below 2/7 and we show that tolerating a
higher error rate is impossible. We also show that in the setting of Franklin
et al. [CRYPTO'13], where parties share randomness not known to the adversary,
adaptivity increases the tolerable error rate from 1/2 to 2/3. For
list-decodable interactive communications, where each party outputs a constant
size list of possible outcomes, the tight tolerable error rate is 1/2.
Our negative results hold even if the communication and computation are
unbounded, whereas for our positive results communication and computation are
polynomially bounded. Most prior work considered coding schemes with linear
amount of communication, while allowing unbounded computations. We argue that
studying tolerable error rates in this relaxed context helps to identify a
setting's intrinsic optimal error rate. We set forward a strong working
hypothesis which stipulates that for any setting the maximum tolerable error
rate is independent of many computational and communication complexity
measures. We believe this hypothesis to be a powerful guideline for the design
of simple, natural, and efficient coding schemes and for understanding the
(im)possibilities of coding for interactive communications
Multi-party Quantum Computation
We investigate definitions of and protocols for multi-party quantum computing
in the scenario where the secret data are quantum systems. We work in the
quantum information-theoretic model, where no assumptions are made on the
computational power of the adversary. For the slightly weaker task of
verifiable quantum secret sharing, we give a protocol which tolerates any t <
n/4 cheating parties (out of n). This is shown to be optimal. We use this new
tool to establish that any multi-party quantum computation can be securely
performed as long as the number of dishonest players is less than n/6.Comment: Masters Thesis. Based on Joint work with Claude Crepeau and Daniel
Gottesman. Full version is in preparatio
Safety Evaluation of Critical Applications Distributed on TDMA-Based Networks
Critical embedded systems have to provide a high level of dependability. In
automotive domain, for example, TDMA protocols are largely recommended because
of their deterministic behavior. Nevertheless, under the transient
environmental perturbations, the loss of communication cycles may occur with a
certain probability and, consequently, the system may fail. This paper analyzes
the impact of the transient perturbations (especially due to Electromagnetic
Interferences) on the dependability of systems distributed on TDMA-based
networks. The dependability of such system is modeled as that of
"consecutive-k-out-of-n:F" systems and we provide a efficient way for its
evaluation
Optimal Error Rates for Interactive Coding II: Efficiency and List Decoding
We study coding schemes for error correction in interactive communications.
Such interactive coding schemes simulate any -round interactive protocol
using rounds over an adversarial channel that corrupts up to
transmissions. Important performance measures for a coding scheme are its
maximum tolerable error rate , communication complexity , and
computational complexity.
We give the first coding scheme for the standard setting which performs
optimally in all three measures: Our randomized non-adaptive coding scheme has
a near-linear computational complexity and tolerates any error rate with a linear communication complexity. This improves over
prior results which each performed well in two of these measures.
We also give results for other settings of interest, namely, the first
computationally and communication efficient schemes that tolerate adaptively, if only one party is required to
decode, and if list decoding is allowed. These are the
optimal tolerable error rates for the respective settings. These coding schemes
also have near linear computational and communication complexity.
These results are obtained via two techniques: We give a general black-box
reduction which reduces unique decoding, in various settings, to list decoding.
We also show how to boost the computational and communication efficiency of any
list decoder to become near linear.Comment: preliminary versio
Genuinely Distributed Byzantine Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) solutions are nowadays distributed, according to the
so-called server/worker architecture. One server holds the model parameters
while several workers train the model. Clearly, such architecture is prone to
various types of component failures, which can be all encompassed within the
spectrum of a Byzantine behavior. Several approaches have been proposed
recently to tolerate Byzantine workers. Yet all require trusting a central
parameter server. We initiate in this paper the study of the ``general''
Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning problem where no individual
component is trusted.
We show that this problem can be solved in an asynchronous system, despite
the presence of Byzantine parameter servers and
Byzantine workers (which is optimal). We present a new algorithm, ByzSGD, which
solves the general Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning problem by
relying on three major schemes. The first, Scatter/Gather, is a communication
scheme whose goal is to bound the maximum drift among models on correct
servers. The second, Distributed Median Contraction (DMC), leverages the
geometric properties of the median in high dimensional spaces to bring
parameters within the correct servers back close to each other, ensuring
learning convergence. The third, Minimum-Diameter Averaging (MDA), is a
statistically-robust gradient aggregation rule whose goal is to tolerate
Byzantine workers. MDA requires loose bound on the variance of non-Byzantine
gradient estimates, compared to existing alternatives (e.g., Krum).
Interestingly, ByzSGD ensures Byzantine resilience without adding communication
rounds (on a normal path), compared to vanilla non-Byzantine alternatives.
ByzSGD requires, however, a larger number of messages which, we show, can be
reduced if we assume synchrony.Comment: This is a merge of arXiv:1905.03853 and arXiv:1911.07537;
arXiv:1911.07537 will be retracte
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