BFT Protocol Forensics

Sheng, Peiyao; Wang, Gerui; Nayak, Kartik; Kannan, Sreeram; Viswanath, Pramod

doi:10.1145/3460120.3484566

Cited by 34 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The complexities of Basilic after GST share the same asymptotic complexity of other recent works that are not actively accountable [12,14,41], some of them not being accountable either [11], as we show in Table 2. This is because the adversary cannot prevent termination of any phase.…”

Section: Basilic's Complexitysupporting

confidence: 80%

“…After these optimizations, the resulting normalized bit complexity (i.e. per decision) of Basilic is as low as those of other works that are only accountable and not actively accountable, such as BFT Forensics [41] or Polygraph [14]. Furthermore, since this is the lowest complexity to obtain accountability [14], this means that this is also optimal in the bit complexity.…”

Section: Basilic's Complexitymentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Note that other optimizations present in other works, such as the possibility to obtain an amortized complexity of O(λ\ ∈ ) in BFT Forensics per decision after n iterations of the protocol [43], is also possible in Basilic's consensus protocol. Finally, an advantage of Basilic, as well as of other leaderless protocols, compared to leader-based works [41,43], is that the distribution of proposals scatters the bits throughout multiple channels of the network, instead of bloating channels that have the leader as sender or recipient, as previously noted [19].…”

Section: Basilic's Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They also motivate the need for the BDB model in their recent accountability-availability dilemma [37]. Sheng et al [41] characterize the forensic support of a variety of Blockchains. Unfortunately, none of these works tolerate q = ⌈ n 3 ⌉ − 1 benign and even d = 1 deceitful faults, or d = ⌈ n 3 ⌉ − 1 and even q = 1 benign fault, a direct consequence of them not satisfying active accountability.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Basilic: Resilient Optimal Consensus Protocols With Benign and Deceitful Faults

Ranchal-Pedrosa¹,

Gramoli²

2022

Preprint

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The problem of Byzantine consensus has been key to designing secure distributed systems. However, it is particularly difficult, mainly due to the presence of Byzantine processes that act arbitrarily and the unknown message delays in general networks. Although it is well known that both safety and liveness are at risk as soon as n/3 Byzantine processes fail, very few works attempted to characterize precisely the faults that produce safety violations from the faults that produce termination violations.In this paper, we present a new lower bound on the solvability of the consensus problem by distinguishing deceitful faults violating safety and benign faults violating termination from the more general Byzantine faults, in what we call the Byzantine-deceitful-benign fault model. We show that one cannot solve consensus if n ≤ 3t + d + 2q with t Byzantine processes, d deceitful processes, and q benign processes.In addition, we show that this bound is tight by presenting the Basilic class of consensus protocols that solve consensus when n > 3t + d + 2q. These protocols differ in the number of processes from which they wait to receive messages before progressing. Each of these protocols is thus better suited for some applications depending on the predominance of benign or deceitful faults.Finally, we study the fault tolerance of the Basilic class of consensus protocols in the context of blockchains that need to solve the weaker problem of eventual consensus. We demonstrate that Basilic solves this problem with only n > 2t + d + q, hence demonstrating how it can strengthen blockchain security.

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Section: Basilic's Complexitysupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Basilic's Complexitymentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Basilic's Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Basilic: Resilient Optimal Consensus Protocols With Benign and Deceitful Faults

Ranchal-Pedrosa¹,

Gramoli²

2022

Preprint

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“…In contrast, our SFT can guarantee safety (linearizability) for any x-strong committed blocks as long as the number of faults does not exceed x. A recent work called BFT Forensics [41] shows how to detect at least f + 1 Byzantine parties under safety violations due to the total number of Byzantine faults > f . In contrast, our SFT aims to guarantee safety even if the number of Byzantine faults exceeds the assumed threshold, by utilizing the optimistic periods to strong commit the blocks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strengthened Fault Tolerance in Byzantine Fault Tolerant Replication

Xiang¹,

Malkhi²,

Nayak³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) is an important building block for constructing permissioned blockchain systems. In contrast to Nakamoto Consensus where any block obtains higher assurance as buried deeper in the blockchain, in BFT SMR, any committed block is secure has a fixed resilience threshold. In this paper, we investigate strengthened fault tolerance (SFT) in BFT SMR under partial synchrony, which provides gradually increased resilience guarantees (like Nakamoto Consensus) during an optimistic period when the network is synchronous and the number of Byzantine faults is small. Moreover, the committed blocks can tolerate more than one-third (up to two-thirds) corruptions even after the optimistic period. Compared to the prior best solution Flexible BFT which requires quadratic message complexity, our solution maintains the linear message complexity of state-of-the-art BFT SMR protocols and requires only marginal bookkeeping overhead. We implement our solution over the open-source Diem project, and give experimental results that demonstrate its efficiency under real-world scenarios.

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