Quorum systems are a key abstraction in distributed fault-tolerant computing for capturing trust assumptions. They can be found at the core of many algorithms for implementing reliable broadcasts, shared memory, consensus and other problems. This paper introduces asymmetric Byzantine quorum systems that model subjective trust. Every process is free to choose which combinations of other processes it trusts and which ones it considers faulty. Asymmetric quorum systems strictly generalize standard Byzantine quorum systems, which have only one global trust assumption for all processes. This work also presents protocols that implement abstractions of shared memory and broadcast primitives with processes prone to Byzantine faults and asymmetric trust. The model and protocols pave the way for realizing more elaborate algorithms with asymmetric trust.
In the standard general-adversary model for multi-party protocols, a global adversary structure is given, and every party must trust in this particular structure. We introduce a more general model, the asymmetric-trust model, wherein every party is allowed to trust in a different, personally customized adversary structure. We have two main contributions. First, we present non-trivial lower and upper bounds for broadcast, verifiable secret sharing, and general multi-party computation in different variations of this new model. The obtained bounds demonstrate that the new model is strictly more powerful than the standard general-adversary model. Second, we propose a framework for expressing and analyzing asymmetric trust in the usual simulation paradigm for defining security of protocols, and in particular show a general composition theorem for protocols with asymmetric trust.