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
1561840858 2114579022 2126789306 2139359217
Our growing reliance on online services accessible on the Internet demands highly available systems that provide correct service without interruptions. Software bugs, operator mistakes, and malicious attacks are a major cause of service interruptions and they can cause arbitrary behavior, that is, Byzantine faults. This article describes a new replication algorithm, BFT, that can be used to build highly available systems that tolerate Byzantine faults. BFT can be used in practice to implement real services: it performs well, it is safe in asynchronous environments such as the Internet, it incorporates mechanisms to defend against Byzantine-faulty clients, and it recovers replicas proactively. The recovery mechanism allows the algorithm to tolerate any number of faults over the lifetime of the system provided fewer than 1 3 of the replicas become faulty within a small window of vulnerability. BFT has been implemented as a generic program library with a simple interface. We used the library to implement the first Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS file system, BFS. The BFT library and BFS perform well because the library incorporates several important optimizations, the most important of which is the use of symmetric cryptography to authenticate messages. The performance results show that BFS performs 2p faster to 24p slower than production implementations of the NFS protocol that are not replicated. This supports our claim that the BFT library can be used to build practical systems that tolerate Byzantine faults. 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. We present Zyzzyva, a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost and simplify the design of Byzantine fault tolerant state machine replication. In Zyzzyva, replicas respond to a client's request without first running an expensive three-phase commit protocol to reach agreement on the order in which the request must be processed. Instead, they optimistically adopt the order proposed by the primary and respond immediately to the client. Replicas can thus become temporarily inconsistent with one another, but clients detect inconsistencies, help correct replicas converge on a single total ordering of requests, and only rely on responses that are consistent with this total order. This approach allows Zyzzyva to reduce replication overheads to near their theoretical minimal.