research-article

The Next 700 BFT Protocols

Authors:

Pierre-Louis Aublin,

Rachid Guerraoui,

Nikola Knežević,

Marko VukolićAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), Volume 32, Issue 4

Article No.: 12, Pages 1 - 45

https://doi.org/10.1145/2658994

Published: 20 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We present Abstract (ABortable STate mAChine replicaTion), a new abstraction for designing and reconfiguring generalized replicated state machines that are, unlike traditional state machines, allowed to abort executing a client’s request if “something goes wrong.”

Abstract can be used to considerably simplify the incremental development of efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT) protocols that are notorious for being difficult to develop. In short, we treat a BFT protocol as a composition of Abstract instances. Each instance is developed and analyzed independently and optimized for specific system conditions. We illustrate the power of Abstract through several interesting examples.

We first show how Abstract can yield benefits of a state-of-the-art BFT protocol in a less painful and error-prone manner. Namely, we develop AZyzzyva, a new protocol that mimics the celebrated best-case behavior of Zyzzyva using less than 35% of the Zyzzyva code. To cover worst-case situations, our abstraction enables one to use in AZyzzyva any existing BFT protocol.

We then present Aliph, a new BFT protocol that outperforms previous BFT protocols in terms of both latency (by up to 360%) and throughput (by up to 30%). Finally, we present R-Aliph, an implementation of Aliph that is robust, that is, whose performance degrades gracefully in the presence of Byzantine replicas and Byzantine clients.

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Index Terms

The Next 700 BFT Protocols
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems Volume 32, Issue 4

January 2015

124 pages

ISSN:0734-2071

EISSN:1557-7333

DOI:10.1145/2723895

Editor:
Todd C. Mowry
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 20 January 2015

Accepted: 01 July 2014

Revised: 01 February 2014

Received: 01 May 2012

Published in TOCS Volume 32, Issue 4

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Mišić VNaderi Mighan SMišić JChang X(2024)Decentralization Is Good or Not? Defending Consensus in Ethereum 2.0Blockchains10.3390/blockchains20100012:1(1-19)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/blockchains2010001
Wu CAmiri MQin HMehta BMarcus RLoo B(2024)Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned BlockchainsProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3641204.364121617:5(1073-1080)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3641204.3641216
Amiri MAgrawal DEl Abbadi ALoo BBarcelo PSanchez-Pi NMeliou ASudarshan S(2024)Distributed Transaction Processing in Untrusted EnvironmentsCompanion of the 2024 International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/3626246.3654684(570-579)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626246.3654684
Sui XDuan SZhang H(2024)BG: A Modular Treatment of BFT Consensus Toward a Unified Theory of BFT ReplicationIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2023.331894319(44-58)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2023.3318943
Kang DRahnama SHellings JSadoghi M(2024)SpotLess: Concurrent Rotational Consensus Made Practical Through Rapid View Synchronization2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00157(1916-1929)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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Voron GGramoli VLiu YSchiller E(2023)Invited Paper: Planetary Scale Byzantine ConsensusProceedings of the 5th workshop on Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems10.1145/3584684.3597270(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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Gogada HMeling HJehl LOlsen JLiu YSchiller E(2023)An Extensible Framework for Implementing and Validating Byzantine Fault-Tolerant ProtocolsProceedings of the 5th workshop on Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems10.1145/3584684.3597266(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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Dai XZhang BJin HRen LMeng WJensen CCremers CKirda E(2023)ParBFT: Faster Asynchronous BFT Consensus with a Parallel Optimistic PathProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3623101(504-518)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
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Gogada HOlsen JMeling HJehl LHong JLanperne MPark JCerny TShahriar H(2023)An Extensible Framework for Implementing Byzantine Fault-Tolerant ProtocolsProceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3555776.3578614(121-124)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
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