The Next 700 BFT Protocols

Modern Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT) protocols involve about 20.000 lines of challenging C++ code encompassing synchronization, networking and cryptography. They are notoriously difficult to develop, test e. We present a new abstraction to simplify these tasks. We treat a BFT protocol as a composition of instances bstraction. Each instance is developed and analyzed independently. To illustrate our approach, we first show how, with our ion, the benefits of a BFT protocol like Zyzzyva could have been obtained with much less pain. Namely, we develop AZyzzyva, a new protocol that mimics the behavior of Zyzzyva in best-case situations (for which Zyzzyva was optimized) using less than 24% of the actual code of Zyzzyva. To cover worst-case situations, our abstraction enables to compose AZyzzyva with any existing BFT protocol, typically, a classical one like PBFT which has been proved correct and widely tested. We then present Aliph, a new BFT protocol that outpe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Rachid Guerraoui, Nikola Knezevic, Vivien Quéma, Marko Vukolic
• Keywords: BFT Protocol, Code Encompassing Synchronization, Computer Science, Eurosys 2010, State-of-the-art Bft Protocols, System Software