Abstract
Asynchronous Byzantine consensus algorithms are an important primitive for building Byzantine fault-tolerant systems. Algorithms for Byzantine consensus typically require at least two communication steps for decision; in many systems, this imposes a significant performance overhead. In this paper, we show that it is possible to design Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithms that decide in one message latency under contention-free scenarios and still provide strong consistency guarantees when contention occurs. We define two variants of one-step asynchronous Byzantine consensus and show a lower bound on the number of processors needed for each. We present a Byzantine consensus algorithm, Bosco, for asynchronous networks that meets these bounds, even in the face of a strong network adversary.
The authors were supported by AFRL award FA8750-06-2-0060 (CASTOR), NSF award 0424422 (TRUST), AFOSR award FA9550-06-1-0244 (AF-TRUST), DHS award 2006-CS-001-000001 (I3P), as well as by ISF, ISOC, CCR, and Intel Corporation. The views and conclusions herein are those of the authors.
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Song, Y.J., van Renesse, R. (2008). Bosco: One-Step Byzantine Asynchronous Consensus. In: Taubenfeld, G. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87779-0_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87779-0_30
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