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Encyclopedia of Algorithms pp 1467–1470Cite as

Optimal Probabilistic Synchronous Byzantine Agreement

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Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1988; Feldman, Micali

Problem Definition

The Byzantine agreement problem (BA) is concerned with multiple processors (parties, “players”) all starting with some initial value, agreeing on a common value, despite the possible disruptive or even malicious behavior of some them. BA is a fundamental problem in fault-tolerant distributed computing and secure multi-party computation.

The problem was introduced by Pease, Shostak and Lamport in [17], who showed that the number of faulty processors must be less than a third of the total number of processors for the problem to have a solution. They also presented a protocol matching this bound, which requires a number of communication rounds proportional to the number of faulty processors – exactly \( { t+1 } \), where t is the number of faulty processors. Fischer and Lynch [10] later showed that this number of rounds is necessary in the worst-case run of any deterministic BA protocol. Furthermore,...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

    Juan Garay

Authors
  1. Juan Garay
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Garay, J. (2016). Optimal Probabilistic Synchronous Byzantine Agreement. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_269

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