Intrusion-Tolerant Broadcast and Agreement Abstractions in the Presence of Byzantine Processes

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 27; no. 4; pp. 1085 - 1098
• Main Authors: Mostefaoui, Achour, Raynal, Michel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Abstraction level; Agreement; Algorithm design and analysis; Algorithms; Asynchronous message-passing system; Broadcast abstraction; Broadcasting; Byzantine process; Coins; Common coin; Computational modeling; Computer crashes; Computer Science; Consensus; Distributed algorithm; Distributed algorithms; Distributed computing; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; Failure; Faulttolerance; Intrusion-tolerance; Message validation; Reduction; Reliability; Reliable broadcast; Security; Signature-free algorithm; Transaction processing; Uncertainty; common coin; agreement; broadcast abstraction; fault-tolerance; byzantine process; intrusion-tolerance; Abstraction level; consensus; distributed algorithm; reliable broadcast; message validation; asynchronous message-passing system; signature-free algorithm; Message validation; Intrusion-tolerance; Signature-free algorithm; Consensus; Agreement; Common coin; Asynchronous message-passing system; Distributed algorithm; Byzantine process; Broadcast abstrac-tion; Fault-tolerance; Reliable broadcast
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183; 2161-9883; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2015.2427797

A process commits a Byzantine failure when its behavior does not comply with the algorithm it is assumed to execute. Considering asynchronous message-passing systems, this paper presents distributed abstractions, and associated algorithms, that allow non-faulty processes to correctly cooperate, despite the uncertainty created by the net effect of asynchrony and Byzantine failures. These abstractions are broadcast abstractions (namely, no-duplicity broadcast, reliable broadcast, and validated broadcast), and agreement abstraction (namely, consensus). While no-duplicity broadcast and reliable broadcast are well-known one-to-all communication abstractions, validated broadcast is a new all-to-all communication abstraction designed to address agreement problems. After having introduced these abstractions, the paper presents an algorithm implementing validated broadcast on top of reliable broadcast. Then the paper presents two consensus algorithms, which are reductions of multivalued consensus to binary consensus. The first one is a generic algorithm, that can be instantiated with unreliable broadcast or no-duplicity broadcast, while the second is a consensus algorithm based on validated broadcast. Finally, a third algorithm is presented that solves the binary consensus problem. This algorithm is a randomized algorithm based on validated broadcast and a common coin. The presentation of all the abstractions and their algorithms is done incrementally.