Repeated Agreement is Cheap! On Weak Accountability and Multishot Byzantine Agreement
Byzantine Agreement (BA) allows π processes to propose input values to reach consensus on a common, valid πΏ π-bit value, even in the presence of up to π‘ < π faulty processes that can deviate arbitrarily from the protocol. Although strategies like randomization, adaptiveness, and batching have been extensively explored to mitigate the inherent limitations of one-shot agreement tasks, there has been limited progress on achieving good amortized performance for multi-shot agreement, despite its obvious relevance to long-lived functionalities such as state machine replication. Observing that a weak form of accountability suffices to identify and exclude malicious processes, we propose new efficient and deterministic multi-shot agreement protocols for multi-value validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA) with a strong unanimity validity property (SMVBA) and interactive consistency (IC). Specifically, let π represent the size of the cryptographic objects needed to solve Byzantine agreement when π < 3π‘. We achieve both IC and SMVBA with π (1) amortized latency, with a bounded number of slower instances. The SMVBA protocol has π (ππΏ π + ππ ) amortized communication and the IC has π (ππΏ π +π 2 π ) amortized communication. For input values larger than π , our protocols are asymptotically optimal. These results mark a substantial improvement-up to a linear factor, depending on πΏ π-over prior results. To the best of our knowledge, the present paper is the first to achieve the long-term goal of implementing a state machine replication abstraction of a distributed service that is just as fast and efficient as its centralized version, but with greater robustness and availability.
Γcole Polytechnique FΓ©dΓ©rale de Lausanne
Γcole Polytechnique FΓ©dΓ©rale de Lausanne
Γcole Polytechnique FΓ©dΓ©rale de Lausanne
Γcole Polytechnique FΓ©dΓ©rale de Lausanne
2025-06-13
New York, NY, USA
979-8-4007-1885-4
15
27
REVIEWED
EPFL
Event name | Event acronym | Event place | Event date |
PODC '25 | Santa MarΓa Huatulco, Mexico | 2025-06-16 - 2025-06-20 | |