Parameterizable Byzantine Broadcast in Loosely Connected Networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of reliably broadcasting information in a multihop asynchronous network, despite the presence of Byzantine failures: some nodes are malicious and behave arbitrarly. We focus on non-cryptographic solutions. Most existing approaches give conditions for perfect reliable broadcast (all correct nodes deliver the good information), but require a highly connected network. A probabilistic approach was recently proposed for loosely connected networks: the Byzantine failures are randomly distributed, and the correct nodes deliver the good information with high probability. A first solution require the nodes to initially know their position on the network, which may be difficult or impossible in self-organizing or dynamic networks. A second solution relaxed this hypothesis but has much weaker Byzantine tolerance guarantees. In this paper, we propose a parameterizable broadcast protocol that does not require nodes to have any knowledge about the network. We give a deterministic technique to compute a set of nodes that always deliver authentic information, for a given set of Byzantine failures. Then, we use this technique to experimentally evaluate our protocol, and show that it significantely outperforms previous solutions with the same hypotheses. Important disclaimer: these results have NOT yet been published in an international conference or journal. This is just a technical report presenting intermediary and incomplete results. A generalized version of these results may be under submission