Abstract
We present the first Byzantine agreement protocol which tolerates any number of maliciously faulty processors without relying on computational assumptions (such as the unforgeability of digital signatures).
Our protocol needs reliable broadcast and secret channels in a precomputation phase. For a security parameter σ, it achieves Byzantine agreement with an error probability of at most 2−α, whereas all computations are polynomial in σ and the number of processors.
The protocol is based on an unconditionally secure authentication mechanism, called pseudosignatures. Pseudosignatures are a generalization of a mechanism by Chaum and Roijakkers and might be useful in other protocols, too.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Birgit Baum-Waidner, Birgit Pfitzmann, Michael Waidner: Unconditional Byzantine Agreement with Good Majority; STACS '91, LNCS 480, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 1991, 285–295.
Jurjen Bos, Bert den Boer: Detection of disrupters in the DC protocol; Eurocrypt '89, LNCS 434, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1990, 320–327.
Herbert O. Burton: Inversionless Decoding of Binary BCH Codes; IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 17/4 (1971) 464–466.
David Chaum: The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability; Journal of Cryptology 1/1 (1988) 65–75.
David Chaum, Sandra Roijakkers: Unconditionally Secure Digital Signatures; Crypto '90, Santa Barbara, 11–15 August 1990, Abstracts, 209–217.
Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Hellman: New Directions in Cryptography; IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22/6 (1976) 644–654.
Danny Dolev, H. Raymond Strong: Authenticated Algorithms for Byzantine Agreement; SIAM J. Comput. 12/4 (1983) 656–666.
Paul Erdös, Joel Spencer: Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics; Probability and Mathematical Statistics 17, Academic Press, New York 1974.
E. N. Gilbert, F. J. Mac Williams, N. J. A. Sloane: Codes which detect deception; The Bell System Technical Journal 53/3 (1974) 405–424.
Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ronald L. Rivest: A Digital Signature Scheme Secure Against Adaptive Chosen-Message Attacks; SIAM J. Comput. 17/2 (1988) 281–308.
Ronald L. Graham, Andrew C. Yao: On the Improbability of Reaching Byzantine Agreement; 21st STOC 1989, ACM Press, New York 1989, 467–478.
Marshall Pease, Robert Shostak, Leslie Lamport: Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults; Journal of the ACM 27/2 (1980) 228–234.
Michael O. Rabin: Probabilistic Algorithms in Finite Fields; SIAM J. Comput. 9/2 (1980) 273–280.
John Rompel: One-Way Functions are Necessary and Sufficient for Secure Signatures; 22nd STOC 1990, ACM Press, New York 1990, 387–394.
Michael Waidner: Byzantinische Verteilung ohne kryptographische Annahmen trotz beliebig vieler Fehler; Universität Karlsruhe, Fakultät für Informatik, Dissertation, October 1991; to appear.
Mark N. Wegman, J. Lawrence Carter: New Hash Functions and Their Use in Authentication and Set Equality; Journal of Computer and System Sciences 22 (1981) 265–279.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pfitzmann, B., Waidner, M. (1992). Unconditional Byzantine agreement for any number of faulty processors. In: Finkel, A., Jantzen, M. (eds) STACS 92. STACS 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 577. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55210-3_195
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55210-3_195
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55210-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46775-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive