Resource-Efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance

One of the main reasons why Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems are currently not widely used lies in their high resource consumption: 3f+1  replicas are required to tolerate only f  faults. Recent works have been able to reduce the minimum number of replicas to 2f+1 by relying on trusted sub...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers 2016-09, Vol.65 (9), p.2807-2819
Main Authors: Distler, Tobias, Cachin, Christian, Kapitza, Rudiger
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Byzantine fault tolerance
Computer crashes
Consumption
distributed systems
Electronic mail
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
Faults
Flexibility
Handling
History
Proposals
Protocols
state machine replication
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Summary:One of the main reasons why Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems are currently not widely used lies in their high resource consumption: 3f+1  replicas are required to tolerate only f  faults. Recent works have been able to reduce the minimum number of replicas to 2f+1 by relying on trusted subsystems that prevent a faulty replica from making conflicting statements to other replicas without being detected. Nevertheless, having been designed with the focus on fault handling, during normal-case operation these systems still use more resources than actually necessary to make progress in the absence of faults. This paper presents Resource-efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance  ( ReBFT ), an approach that minimizes the resource usage of a BFT system during normal-case operation by keeping f  replicas in a passive mode. In contrast to active replicas, passive replicas neither participate in the agreement protocol nor execute client requests; instead, they are brought up to speed by verified state updates provided by active replicas. In case of suspected or detected faults, passive replicas are activated in a consistent manner. To underline the flexibility of our approach, we apply ReBFT to two existing BFT systems: PBFT and MinBFT.
ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2015.2495213