Asynchronous Byzantine Systems: From Multivalued to Binary Consensus with t < n/3, O(n²) Messages, O(1) Time, and no Signature

Abstract

International audienceThis paper presents a new algorithm that reduces multivalued consensus to binary consensus in an asyn-chronous message-passing system made up of n processes where up to t may commit Byzantine failures. This algorithm has the following noteworthy properties: it assumes t < n/3 (and is consequently optimal from a resilience point of view), uses O(n²) messages, has a constant time complexity, and does not use signatures. The design of this reduction algorithm relies on two new all-to-all communication abstractions. The first one allows the non-faulty processes to reduce the number of proposed values to c, where c is a small constant. The second communication abstraction allows each non-faulty process to compute a set of (proposed) values such that, if the set of a non-faulty process contains a single value, then this value belongs to the set of any non-faulty process. Both communication abstractions have an O(n²) message complexity and a constant time complexity. The reduction of multivalued Byzantine consensus to binary Byzantine consensus is then a simple sequential use of these communication abstractions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first asynchronous message-passing algorithm that reduces multivalued consensus to binary consensus with O(n²) messages and constant time complexity (measured with the longest causal chain of messages) in the presence of up to t < n/3 Byzantine processes, and without using cryptography techniques. Moreover, this reduction algorithm tolerates message reordering by Byzantine processes