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Brief Announcement: From Few to Many Faults: Adaptive Byzantine Agreement with Optimal Communication

Authors Andrei Constantinescu , Marc Dufay , Anton Paramonov , Roger Wattenhofer

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • Byzantine Agreement
  • Communication Complexity
  • Adaptive Communication Complexity
  • Resilience

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Abstract

We study the problem of Strong Byzantine Agreement and establish tight upper and lower bounds on communication complexity, parameterized by the actual number of Byzantine faults. Specifically, for a system of n parties tolerating up to t Byzantine faults, out of which only f ≤ t are actually faulty, we obtain the following results:
In the partially synchronous setting, we present the first Byzantine Agreement protocol that achieves adaptive communication complexity of 𝒪(n + t ⋅ f) words, which is asymptotically optimal. Our protocol has an optimal resilience of t < n/3.
In the asynchronous setting, we prove a lower bound of Ω(n + t²) on the expected number of messages, and design an almost matching protocol with an optimal resilience that solves agreement with 𝒪((n + t²)⋅ log n) words. Our main technical contribution in the asynchronous setting is the utilization of a bipartite expander graph that allows for low-cost information dissemination.

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Andrei Constantinescu, Marc Dufay, Anton Paramonov, and Roger Wattenhofer. Brief Announcement: From Few to Many Faults: Adaptive Byzantine Agreement with Optimal Communication. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 52:1-52:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.52

Author Details

Andrei Constantinescu
  • ETH Zürich, Switzerland
  • DFINITY Foundation, Zürich, Switzerland
Marc Dufay
  • ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Anton Paramonov
  • ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Roger Wattenhofer
  • ETH Zürich, Switzerland

References

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