Consistency Is Not Enough in Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Abstract

The use of good random numbers is crucial to the security of many mission-critical systems. However, when such systems are replicated for Byzantine fault tolerance, a serious issue arises, i.e., how do we preserve the integrity of the systems while ensuring strong replica consistency? Despite the fact that there exists a large body of work on how to render replicas deterministic under the benign fault model, the solutions regarding the random number control are often overly simplistic without regard to the security requirement, and hence, they are not suitable for practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In this chapter, we present a novel integrity-preserving replica coordination algorithm for Byzantine fault tolerant systems. The central idea behind our CD-BFT algorithm is that all random numbers to be used by the replicas are collectively determined, based on the contributions made by a quorum of replicas, at least f+1 of which are not faulty.