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Composable Byzantine Agreements with Reorder Attacks

Authors Jing Chen, Jin Dong, Jichen Li , Xuanzhi Xia , Wentao Zhou

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
  • Security and privacy → Security protocols
Keywords
  • Byzantine agreement
  • protocol composition
  • channel reorder attack
  • security threshold

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Abstract

Byzantine agreement (BA) is a foundational building block in distributed systems that has been extensively studied for decades. With the growing demand for protocol composition in practice, the security analysis of BA protocols under multi-instance executions has attracted increasing attention. However, most existing adversary models focus solely on party corruption and neglect important threats posed by adversarial manipulations of communication channels in the network. Through channel attacks, messages can be reordered across multiple executions and lead to violations of the protocol’s security guarantees, without the participating parties being corrupted.
In this work, we present the first adversary model that combines party corruption and channel attacks. Based on this model, we establish new security thresholds for Byzantine agreement under parallel and concurrent compositions, supported by complementary impossibility and possibility results that match each other to form a tight bound. For the impossibility result, we show that even authenticated Byzantine agreement protocols cannot be secure under parallel composition when n ≤ 3t or n ≤ 2c + 2t + 1, where t and c denote the number of corrupted parties and communication channels, respectively. For the possibility result, we prove the existence of secure protocols for unauthenticated Byzantine agreement under parallel and concurrent composition, when n > 3t and n > 2c+2t+1. More specifically, we provide a general black-box compiler that transforms any single-instance secure BA protocol into one that is secure under parallel executions, and we provide a non-black-box construction for concurrent compositions.

Cite As Get BibTex

Jing Chen, Jin Dong, Jichen Li, Xuanzhi Xia, and Wentao Zhou. Composable Byzantine Agreements with Reorder Attacks. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 13:1-13:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.13

Author Details

Jing Chen
  • Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Jin Dong
  • Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing (BABEC), China
Jichen Li
  • Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Xuanzhi Xia
  • Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Wentao Zhou
  • Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Funding

This work is partially supported by Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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