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Liveness and Latency of Byzantine State-Machine Replication

Authors Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, Alexey Gotsman

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Author Details

Manuel Bravo
  • Informal Systems, Madrid, Spain
Gregory Chockler
  • University of Surrey, UK
Alexey Gotsman
  • IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

Funding

This work was partially supported by an ERC Starting Grant RACCOON and by a research grant from Nomadic Labs and the Tezos Foundation.

Acknowledgements

We thank the following people for comments that helped improve the paper: Lăcrămioara Aştefănoaei, Hagit Attiya, Alysson Besani, Armando Castañeda, Peter Davies, Dan O'Keeffe, Idit Keidar, Giuliano Losa, Alejandro Naser, and Eugen Zălinescu.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, and Alexey Gotsman. Liveness and Latency of Byzantine State-Machine Replication. In 36th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 246, pp. 12:1-12:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2022.12

Abstract

Byzantine state-machine replication (SMR) ensures the consistency of replicated state in the presence of malicious replicas and lies at the heart of the modern blockchain technology. Byzantine SMR protocols often guarantee safety under all circumstances and liveness only under synchrony. However, guaranteeing liveness even under this assumption is nontrivial. So far we have lacked systematic ways of incorporating liveness mechanisms into Byzantine SMR protocols, which often led to subtle bugs. To close this gap, we introduce a modular framework to facilitate the design of provably live and efficient Byzantine SMR protocols. Our framework relies on a view abstraction generated by a special SMR synchronizer primitive to drive the agreement on command ordering. We present a simple formal specification of an SMR synchronizer and its bounded-space implementation under partial synchrony. We also apply our specification to prove liveness and analyze the latency of three Byzantine SMR protocols via a uniform methodology. In particular, one of these results yields what we believe is the first rigorous liveness proof for the algorithmic core of the seminal PBFT protocol.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed computing models
Keywords
  • Replication
  • blockchain
  • partial synchrony
  • liveness

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