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  4. All Byzantine Agreement Problems Are Expensive
 
conference paper

All Byzantine Agreement Problems Are Expensive

Civit, Pierre Philippe  
•
Gilbert, Seth  
•
Guerraoui, Rachid  
Show more
June 17, 2024
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Byzantine agreement, arguably the most fundamental problem in distributed computing, operates among n processes, out of which t < n can exhibit arbitrary failures. The problem states that all correct (non-faulty) processes must eventually decide (termination) the same value (agreement) from a set of admissible values defined by the proposals of the processes (validity). Depending on the exact version of the validity property, Byzantine agreement comes in different forms, from Byzantine broadcast to strong and weak consensus, to modern variants of the problem introduced in today's blockchain systems. Regardless of the specific flavor of the agreement problem, its communication cost is a fundamental metric whose improvement has been the focus of decades of research. The Dolev-Reischuk bound, one of the most celebrated results in distributed computing, proved 40 years ago that, at least for Byzantine broadcast, no deterministic solution can do better than Ω(t2) exchanged messages in the worst case. Since then, it remained unknown whether the quadratic lower bound extends to all variants of Byzantine agreement. This paper answers the question in the affirmative, closing this long-standing open problem. Namely, we prove that any non-trivial agreement problem requires Ω(t2) messages to be exchanged in the worst case. To prove the general lower bound, we determine the weakest Byzantine agreement problem and show, via a novel indistinguishability argument, that it incurs Ω(t2) exchanged messages even in the general omission model.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3662158.3662780
ArXiv ID

2311.08060v2

Author(s)
Civit, Pierre Philippe  

EPFL

Gilbert, Seth  
Guerraoui, Rachid  

EPFL

Komatovic, Jovan  

EPFL

Paramonov, Anton  

EPFL

Ribeiro Vidigueira, Manuel José  

EPFL

Date Issued

2024-06-17

Publisher

ACM

Publisher place

New York, USA

Published in
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
ISBN of the book

979-8-4007-0668-4

Start page

157

End page

169

Subjects

Computer Science - Distributed; Parallel; and Cluster Computing

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

PODC

Nantes, France

2024-06-17 - 2024-06-21

FunderGrant Number

Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

40B2-0_218648 ; 200021_215383

Ministry of Education - Singapore

MOE-T2EP20122-0014

Available on Infoscience
August 26, 2024
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/240860
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