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Brief Announcement

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.50

Brief Announcement: Weaker Assumptions for Asymmetric Trust

Authors: Christian Cachin and Juan Villacis

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 356, 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)

Abstract

In protocols with asymmetric trust, each participant is free to make its own trust assumptions about others, captured by an asymmetric quorum system. This contrasts with ordinary, symmetric quorum systems and threshold models, where trust assumptions are uniformly shared among participants. Fundamental problems like reliable broadcast and consensus are unsolvable in the asymmetric model if quorum systems satisfy only the classical properties of consistency and availability. As a result, existing solutions introduce stronger assumptions to circumvent this limitation. We show that some requirements used by state-of-the-art approaches are overly restrictive, so much so that they effectively eliminate the benefits of asymmetric trust. To address this, we propose a new approach to characterize asymmetric problems and, building upon it, present an asymmetric asynchronous unauthenticated reliable broadcast algorithm that significantly weakens the assumptions needed to solve the problem. Our techniques are general and can be readily adapted to other core problems in the asymmetric trust setting.

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Christian Cachin and Juan Villacis. Brief Announcement: Weaker Assumptions for Asymmetric Trust. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 50:1-50:7, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{cachin_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2025.50,
  author =	{Cachin, Christian and Villacis, Juan},
  title =	{{Brief Announcement: Weaker Assumptions for Asymmetric Trust}},
  booktitle =	{39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)},
  pages =	{50:1--50:7},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-402-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{356},
  editor =	{Kowalski, Dariusz R.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.50},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-248667},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.50},
  annote =	{Keywords: Asymmetric Trust, Quorum Systems, Reliable Broadcast}
}

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Brief Announcement: Weaker Assumptions for Asymmetric Trust

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