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Large scale cryptocurrencies require the participation of millions of participants and support economic activity of billions of dollars, which has led to new lines of work in binary Byzantine Agreement (BBA) and consensus. The new work aims to achieve communication-efficiency---given such a large $n$, not everyone can speak during the protocol. Several protocols have achieved consensus with communication-efficiency, even under an adaptive adversary, but they require additional strong assumptions---proof-of-work, memory-erasure, etc. All of these protocols use multicast: every honest replica multicasts messages to all other replicas. Under this model, we provide a new communication-efficient consensus protocol using Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) that is secure against adaptive adversaries and does not require the same strong assumptions present in other protocols. A natural question is whether we can extend the synchronous protocols to the partially synchronous setting---in this work, we show that using multicast, we cannot. Furthermore, we cannot achieve always safe communication-efficient protocols (that maintain safety with probability 1) even in the synchronous setting against a static adversary when honest replicas only choose to multicast its messages. Considering these impossibility results, we describe a new communication-efficient BBA protocol in a modified partially synchronous network model which is secure against adaptive adversaries with high probability.
In this paper we extend the Multidimensional Byzantine Agreement (MBA) Protocol arXiv:2105.13487v2, a leaderless Byzantine agreement for vectors of arbitrary values, into the emph{Cob} protocol, that works in Asynchronous Gossiping (AG) networks. This generalization allows the consensus process to be run by an incomplete network of nodes provided with (non-synchronized) same-speed clocks. Not all nodes are active in every step, so the network size does not hamper the efficiency, as long as the gossiping broadcast delivers the messages to every node in reasonable time. These network assumptions model more closely real-life communication channels, so the Cob protocol may be applicable to a variety of practical problems, such as blockchain platforms implementing sharding. The Cob protocol has the same Bernoulli-like distribution that upper bounds the number of steps required as the MBA protocol, and we prove its correctness and security assuming a supermajority of honest nodes in the network.
In this paper we will present the Multidimensional Byzantine Agreement (MBA) Protocol, a leaderless Byzantine agreement protocol defined for complete and synchronous networks that allows a network of nodes to reach consensus on a vector of relevant information regarding a set of observed events. The consensus process is carried out in parallel on each component, and the output is a vector whose components are either values with wide agreement in the network (even if no individual node agrees on every value) or a special value $bot$ that signals irreconcilable disagreement. The MBA Protocol is probabilistic and its execution halts with probability 1, and the number of steps necessary to halt follows a Bernoulli-like distribution. The design combines a Multidimensional Graded Consensus and a Multidimensional Binary Byzantine Agreement, the generalization to the multidimensional case of two protocols by Micali and Feldman. We prove the correctness and security of the protocol assuming a synchronous network where less than a third of the nodes are malicious.
Given a boolean predicate $Pi$ on labeled networks (e.g., proper coloring, leader election, etc.), a self-stabilizing algorithm for $Pi$ is a distributed algorithm that can start from any initial configuration of the network (i.e., every node has an arbitrary value assigned to each of its variables), and eventually converge to a configuration satisfying $Pi$. It is known that leader election does not have a deterministic self-stabilizing algorithm using a constant-size register at each node, i.e., for some networks, some of their nodes must have registers whose sizes grow with the size $n$ of the networks. On the other hand, it is also known that leader election can be solved by a deterministic self-stabilizing algorithm using registers of $O(log log n)$ bits per node in any $n$-node bounded-degree network. We show that this latter space complexity is optimal. Specifically, we prove that every deterministic self-stabilizing algorithm solving leader election must use $Omega(log log n)$-bit per node registers in some $n$-node networks. In addition, we show that our lower bounds go beyond leader election, and apply to all problems that cannot be solved by anonymous algorithms.
Consider a distributed system with $n$ processors out of which $f$ can be Byzantine faulty. In the approximate agreement task, each processor $i$ receives an input value $x_i$ and has to decide on an output value $y_i$ such that - the output values are in the convex hull of the non-faulty processors input values, - the output values are within distance $d$ of each other. Classically, the values are assumed to be from an $m$-dimensional Euclidean space, where $m ge 1$. In this work, we study the task in a discrete setting, where input values with some structure expressible as a graph. Namely, the input values are vertices of a finite graph $G$ and the goal is to output vertices that are within distance $d$ of each other in $G$, but still remain in the graph-induced convex hull of the input values. For $d=0$, the task reduces to consensus and cannot be solved with a deterministic algorithm in an asynchronous system even with a single crash fault. For any $d ge 1$, we show that the task is solvable in asynchronous systems when $G$ is chordal and $n > (omega+1)f$, where $omega$ is the clique number of~$G$. In addition, we give the first Byzantine-tolerant algorithm for a variant of lattice agreement. For synchronous systems, we show tight resilience bounds for the exact variants of these and related tasks over a large class of combinatorial structures.
In this paper, we give a deterministic two-step Byzantine consensus protocol that achieves safety and liveness. A two-step Byzantine consensus protocol only needs two communication steps to commit in the absence of faults. Most two-step Byzantine consensus protocols exploit optimism and require a recovery protocol in the presence of faults. In this paper, we give a simple two-step Byzantine consensus protocol that does not need a recovery protocol.