Strong replica consistency is often achieved by writing deterministic applications, or by using a variety of mechanisms to render replicas deterministic. There exists a large body of work on how to render replicas deterministic under the benign fault model. However, when replicas can be subject to malicious faults, most of the previous work is no longer effective. Furthermore, the determinism of the replicas is often considered harmful from the security perspective and for many applications, their integrity strongly depends on the randomness of some of their internal operations. This calls for new approaches towards achieving replica consistency while preserving the replica randomness. In this paper, we present two such approaches. One is based on Byzantine agreement and the other on threshold coin-tossing. Each approach has its strength and weaknesses. We compare the performance of the two approaches and outline their respective best use scenarios.
In the recent several years, significant progress has been made towards building practical Byzantine fault tolerant systems, as shown in the series of seminal papers such as @cite_19 @cite_0 @cite_3 @cite_9 . This makes it possible to address the problem of reconciliation of the requirement of strong replica consistency and the preservation of each replica's randomness for real-world applications that requires both high availability and high degree of security. We believe the work presented in this paper is an important step towards solving this challenging problem.
@cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_9 @cite_3
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Byzantine fault-tolerant storage systems can provide high availability in hazardous environments, but the redundant servers they require increase software development and hardware costs. In order to minimize the number of servers required to implement fault-tolerant storage services, we develop a new algorithm that uses a "Listeners" pattern of network communication to detect and resolve ordering ambiguities created by concurrent accesses to the system. Our protocol requires 3f + 1 servers to tolerate up to f Byzantine faults--f fewer than the 4f + 1 required by existing protocols for non-self-verifying data. In addition, SBQ-L provides atomic consistency semantics, which is stronger than the regular or pseudo-atomic semantics provided by these existing protocols. We show that this protocol is optimal in the number of servers-- any protocol that provides safe semantics or stronger requires at least 3f + 1 servers to tolerate f Byzantine faults in an asynchronous system. Finally, we examine a non-confirmable writes variation of the SBQ-L protocol where a client cannot determine when its writes complete. We show that SBQ-L with non-confirmable writes provides regular semantics with 2f + 1 servers and that this number of servers is minimal. Researchers have made great strides in improving the fault tolerance of both centralized and replicated systems against arbitrary (Byzantine) faults. However, there are hard limits to how much can be done with entirely untrusted components; for example, replicated state machines cannot tolerate more than a third of their replica population being Byzantine. In this paper, we investigate how minimal trusted abstractions can push through these hard limits in practical ways. We propose Attested Append-Only Memory (A2M), a trusted system facility that is small, easy to implement and easy to verify formally. A2M provides the programming abstraction of a trusted log, which leads to protocol designs immune to equivocation -- the ability of a faulty host to lie in different ways to different clients or servers -- which is a common source of Byzantine headaches. Using A2M, we improve upon the state of the art in Byzantine-fault tolerant replicated state machines, producing A2M-enabled protocols (variants of Castro and Liskov's PBFT) that remain correct (linearizable) and keep making progress (live) even when half the replicas are faulty, in contrast to the previous upper bound. We also present an A2M-enabled single-server shared storage protocol that guarantees linearizability despite server faults. We implement A2M and our protocols, evaluate them experimentally through micro- and macro-benchmarks, and argue that the improved fault tolerance is cost-effective for a broad range of uses, opening up new avenues for practical, more reliable services. This paper describes a new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults. We believe that Byzantinefault-tolerant algorithms will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior. Whereas previous algorithms assumed a synchronous system or were too slow to be used in practice, the algorithm described in this paper is practical: it works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude. We implemented a Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS service using our algorithm and measured its performance. The results show that our service is only 3 slower than a standard unreplicated NFS. We describe a new architecture for Byzantine fault tolerant state machine replication that separates agreement that orders requests from execution that processes requests. This separation yields two fundamental and practically significant advantages over previous architectures. First, it reduces replication costs because the new architecture can tolerate faults in up to half of the state machine replicas that execute requests. Previous systems can tolerate faults in at most a third of the combined agreement state machine replicas. Second, separating agreement from execution allows a general privacy firewall architecture to protect confidentiality through replication. In contrast, replication in previous systems hurts confidentiality because exploiting the weakest replica can be sufficient to compromise the system. We have constructed a prototype and evaluated it running both microbenchmarks and an NFS server. Overall, we find that the architecture adds modest latencies to unreplicated systems and that its performance is competitive with existing Byzantine fault tolerant systems.