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How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?

Authors Nenad Milošević , Daniel Cason , Zarko Milošević , Fernando Pedone

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Author Details

Nenad Milošević
  • Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland
Daniel Cason
  • Informal Systems, Toronto, Canada
Zarko Milošević
  • Informal Systems, Toronto, Canada
Fernando Pedone
  • Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 175717).

Cite As Get BibTex

Nenad Milošević, Daniel Cason, Zarko Milošević, and Fernando Pedone. How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?. In 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 324, pp. 20:1-20:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.20

Abstract

Synchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols have long been a reality in an academic setting, yet their practicality remains debated. The main concern of skeptics of synchronous systems is that the correctness of these protocols depends on the timely delivery of all messages within a predefined synchronous bound, Δ. This dependency creates a challenging tradeoff between protocol correctness and performance, as Δ directly impacts both. In this paper, we examine this tradeoff in detail. Specifically, we introduce BoundBFT, a new synchronous BFT consensus protocol. We analyze how BoundBFT’s correctness can be compromised and use this analysis to design and implement the most effective attack strategies that malicious processes could employ. Furthermore, we experimentally determine the synchronous bound Δ that provides sufficient confidence in maintaining protocol correctness even in the presence of malicious replicas. Finally, we apply this discovered bound to BoundBFT, evaluate its performance, and compare it to state-of-the-art synchronous and partially synchronous protocols.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Reliability
  • Computer systems organization → Availability
  • Computer systems organization → Redundancy
  • Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • Synchronous Consensus
  • Byzantine Failures
  • Blockchain

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