Skip to main content

A Leader-Free Byzantine Consensus Algorithm

  • Conference paper
Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5935))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

The paper considers the consensus problem in a partially synchronous system with Byzantine faults. It turns out that, in the partially synchronous system, all deterministic algorithms that solve consensus with Byzantine faults are leader-based. This is not the case of benign faults, which raises the following fundamental question: is it possible to design a deterministic Byzantine consensus algorithm for a partially synchronous system that is not leader-based? The paper gives a positive answer to this question, and presents a leader-free algorithm that is resilient-optimal and signature-free.

Research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 200021-111701.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Pease, M., Shostak, R., Lamport, L.: Reaching agreement in the presence of faults. J. ACM 27(2), 228–234 (1980)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Fischer, M.J., Lynch, N.A., Paterson, M.S.: Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. JACM 32(2), 374–382 (1985)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Ben-Or, M.: Another advantage of free choice (extended abstract): Completely asynchronous agreement protocols. In: PODC 1983, pp. 27–30. ACM, New York (1983)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Rabin, M.: Randomized Byzantine generals. In: Proc. Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 403–409 (1983)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bracha, G.: An asynchronous [(n - 1)/3]-resilient consensus protocol. In: PODC 1984, pp. 154–162. ACM, New York (1984)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Dwork, C., Lynch, N., Stockmeyer, L.: Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. JACM 35(2), 288–323 (1988)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 20(4), 398–461 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Martin, J.-P., Alvisi, L.: Fast Byzantine consensus. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 3(3), 202–215 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Kotla, R., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M., Clement, A., Wong, E.: Zyzzyva: speculative byzantine fault tolerance. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 41(6), 45–58 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Amir, Y., Coan, B., Kirsch, J., Lane, J.: Byzantine replication under attack. In: DSN 2008, pp. 197–206 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Clement, A., Wong, E., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M., Marchetti, M.: Making Byzantine fault tolerant systems tolerate Byzantine faults. In: NSDI 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA, pp. 153–168. USENIX Association (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lamport, L.: State-Machine Reconfiguration: Past, Present, and the Cloudy Future. In: DISC Workshop on Theoretical Aspects of Dynamic Distributed Systems (September 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lynch, N.A.: Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1996)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Borran, F., Schiper, A.: A Leader-free Byzantine Consensus Algorithm. Technical report, EPFL (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Attiya, H., Welch, J.: Distributed Computing: fundamentals, simulations, and advanced topics. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Charron-Bost, B., Schiper, A.: The Heard-Of model: computing in distributed systems with benign faults. Distributed Computing 22(1), 49–71 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Biely, M., Widder, J., Charron-Bost, B., Gaillard, A., Hutle, M., Schiper, A.: Tolerating corrupted communication. In: PODC 2007, pp. 244–253. ACM, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Moses, Y., Waarts, O.: Coordinated traversal: (t + 1)-round byzantine agreement in polynomial time. In: FOCS, pp. 246–255 (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Song, Y.J., van Renesse, R.: Bosco: One-step byzantine asynchronous consensus. In: Taubenfeld, G. (ed.) DISC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5218, pp. 438–450. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Borran, F., Schiper, A. (2010). A Leader-Free Byzantine Consensus Algorithm. In: Kant, K., Pemmaraju, S.V., Sivalingam, K.M., Wu, J. (eds) Distributed Computing and Networking. ICDCN 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5935. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11322-2_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11322-2_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11321-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11322-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics