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Byzantine Agreement Secure against General Adversaries in the Dual Failure Model

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Distributed Computing (DISC 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1693))

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new adversary model for Byzantine agreement and broadcast among a set P of players in which the adversary may perform two different types of player corruption: active (Byzantine) corruption and fail-corruption (crash). As a strict generalization of the results of Garay and Perry, who proved tight bounds on the maximal number of actively and fail-corrupted players, the adversary’s capability is characterized by a set Z of pairs (A,F) of subsets of P where the adversary may select an arbitrary such pair (A i , F i ) from Z and corrupt the players in A i actively and fail-corrupt the players in F i .

For this model we prove that the exact condition on Z for which perfectly secure agreement and broadcast are achievable is that for no three pairs (A i ,F i ),(A j ,F j ), and (A k ,F k ) in Z we have A i ∪A j ∪A k ∪(F i ∩F j ∩F j ) = P. Achievability is demonstrated by efficient protocols. Moreover, for a slightly stronger condition on Z, which covers the previous mixed (active and fail-corruption) threshold condition and the previous purely-active non-threshold condition, we demonstrate agreement and broadcast pro- tocols that are substantially more efficient than all previous protocols for these two settings.

Abstract

Research supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), SPP project no. 5003-045293

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH-8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bernd Altmann, Matthias Fitzi & Ueli Maurer

Authors
  1. Bernd Altmann
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  2. Matthias Fitzi
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  3. Ueli Maurer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Computer Science 6211 Sudikoff Laboratory for Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Prasad Jayanti

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Altmann, B., Fitzi, M., Maurer, U. (1999). Byzantine Agreement Secure against General Adversaries in the Dual Failure Model. In: Jayanti, P. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1693. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48169-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48169-9_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66531-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48169-0

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