Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Required Readings⌗

• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Optional⌗

• Blockchain in the Lens of BFT
• Byzantine General’s Problem
• Mapping the Blockchain Project Ecosystem
• The Saddest Moment

Summary⌗

• Byzantine Failure and Byzantine Generals
• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• pBFT Algorithm
• Byzantine Consensus vs Blockchain

Byzantine Failure and Byzantine Generals⌗

Byzantine failures are where a node fails and continues to behave incorrectly

Could be malicious or arbitrary

Byzantine Fault Tolerance⌗

Goal:

• Reach consensus
  • Safety, liveness, validity
• Tolerate up to f failures
• Asynchronous network

Use cryptographic messages to verify message endpoints and to verify the message has not been tampered with.

To tolerate f failures, we need 3f + 1 nodes

To guard against corrupt leader, we need additional checks among participants

To handle FLP Theorem, we have bounded delay (or eventual synchrony) for liveness

Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance⌗

pBFT algorithm was introduced by Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov in 1999

High performance algorithm

Setup:

• System is a replicated service
  • n = 3f + 1
  • Primary/Leader and backups
• All operations are within a view
• Each replica maintains the service state
  • Must be consistent
  • State includes:
    • Service State
    • Message Log
    • Current View
• Communication integrity guaranteed cryptographically
  • Digests
  • Public keys

Quorum = n - f nodes

pBFT Algorithm⌗

Client request -> pre-prepare -> prepare -> commit -> reply

PrePrepare⌗

Primary node multicasts pre-prepare piggybacked with message to backups

The message is stored in the log

pre-prepare request includes

• sequence number
• digest of message
• signature

Backups accept pre-prepare request if:

• Signature and digest are correct
• View is correct
• Sequence number is new
• Sequence number is between two watermarks

Then replica enters prepare phase

Prepare⌗

Multicasts prepare message and adds the message to log, then waits for 2f matching prepares which have same view, sequence number, and digest. Then it moves to commit stage.

Commit⌗

Replica multicasts a commit message and adds the message to log, waits for 2f +1 commit messages, then sends reply to client.

Byzantine Consensus vs Blockchain⌗

Blockchain’s distributed ledger is similar to Paxos’s replicated log

Can we build Blockchain network with just pBFT?

Not everyone is able to participate in maintaining the ledger

• Only the miners that have Proof-of-Work

There are also incentives for good behavior