research-article

Communication Complexity of Byzantine Agreement, Revisited

Authors:

T-H. Hubert Chan,

Elaine ShiAuthors Info & Claims

PODC '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Pages 317 - 326

https://doi.org/10.1145/3293611.3331629

Published: 16 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

As Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocols find application in large-scale decentralized cryptocurrencies, an increasingly important problem is to design BA protocols with improved communication complexity. A few existing works have shown how to achieve subquadratic BA under an adaptive adversary. Intriguingly, they all make a common relaxation about the adaptivity of the attacker, that is, if an honest node sends a message and then gets corrupted in some round, the adversary cannot erase the message that was already sent - henceforth we say that such an adversary cannot perform "after-the-fact removal". By contrast, many (super-)quadratic BA protocols in the literature can tolerate after-the-fact removal. In this paper, we first prove that disallowing after-the-fact removal is necessary for achieving subquadratic-communication BA.

Next, we show a new subquadratic binary BA construction (of course, assuming no after-the-fact removal) that achieves near- optimal resilience and expected constant rounds under standard cryptographic assumptions and a public-key infrastructure (PKI). In comparison, all known subquadratic protocols make additional strong assumptions such as random oracles or the ability of honest nodes to erase secrets from memory, and even with these strong assumptions, no prior work can achieve the above properties. Lastly, we show that some setup assumption is necessary for achieving subquadratic multicast-based BA.

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Cited By

Wang HYou QDuan S(2025) Synchronous Byzantine Agreement With O ( n ) Messages and O (1) Expected Time IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.351585420(338-349)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2024.3515854
Blum EBoyle ECohen RLiu-Zhang C(2025)Communication lower bounds for cryptographic broadcast protocolsDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-024-00473-5Online publication date: 7-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-024-00473-5
Hajiaghayi MKowalski DOlkowski JKuznetsov PGelles ROlivetti D(2024)Nearly-Optimal Consensus Tolerating Adaptive Omissions: Why a Lot of Randomness is Needed?Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3662158.3662826(321-331)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662158.3662826
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Communication Complexity of Byzantine Agreement, Revisited
1. Hardware
  1. Robustness
    1. Fault tolerance
2. Theory of computation
  1. Computational complexity and cryptography
    1. Cryptographic protocols
  2. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Distributed algorithms

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Abstract
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cover image ACM Conferences

PODC '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 2019

563 pages

ISBN:9781450362177

DOI:10.1145/3293611

General Chair:
Peter Robinson
City University of Hong Kong
,
Program Chair:
Faith Ellen
University of Toronto, Canada

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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Published: 16 July 2019

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PODC '19

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PODC '19: ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 29 - August 2, 2019

Toronto ON, Canada

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PODC '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 173 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 740 of 2,477 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Wang HYou QDuan S(2025) Synchronous Byzantine Agreement With O ( n ) Messages and O (1) Expected Time IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.351585420(338-349)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2024.3515854
Blum EBoyle ECohen RLiu-Zhang C(2025)Communication lower bounds for cryptographic broadcast protocolsDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-024-00473-5Online publication date: 7-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-024-00473-5
Hajiaghayi MKowalski DOlkowski JKuznetsov PGelles ROlivetti D(2024)Nearly-Optimal Consensus Tolerating Adaptive Omissions: Why a Lot of Randomness is Needed?Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3662158.3662826(321-331)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662158.3662826
Civit PDzulfikar MGilbert SGuerraoui RKomatovic JVidigueira MKuznetsov PGelles ROlivetti D(2024)DARE to Agree: Byzantine Agreement With Optimal Resilience and Adaptive CommunicationProceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3662158.3662792(145-156)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662158.3662792
Civit PGilbert SGuerraoui RKomatovic JParamonov AVidigueira MKuznetsov PGelles ROlivetti D(2024)All Byzantine Agreement Problems Are ExpensiveProceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3662158.3662780(157-169)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662158.3662780
Gelles YKomargodski IMohar BShinkar IO'Donnell R(2024)Optimal Load-Balanced Scalable Distributed AgreementProceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing10.1145/3618260.3649736(411-422)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618260.3649736
Schmiedel HHan RTang QSteinfeld RYu J(2024)Modeling Mobile Crash in Byzantine Consensus2024 IEEE 37th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00043(159-171)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00043
Albouy TFrey DRaynal MTaïani F(2024)Good-case early-stopping latency of synchronous byzantine reliable broadcast: the deterministic caseDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-024-00464-637:2(121-143)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-024-00464-6
Civit PDzulfikar MGilbert SGramoli VGuerraoui RKomatovic JVidigueira M(2024)Byzantine consensus is : the Dolev-Reischuk bound is tight even in partial synchrony!Distributed Computing10.1007/s00446-023-00458-w37:2(89-119)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00446-023-00458-w
Elsheimy FLoss JPapamanthou C(2024)Early Stopping Byzantine Agreement in $$(1+\epsilon ) \cdot f$$ RoundsAdvances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 202410.1007/978-981-96-0938-3_13(398-424)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0938-3_13
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