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Byzantine Consensus with Unknown Participants

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Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5401))

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Abstract

Consensus is a fundamental building block used to solve many practical problems that appear on reliable distributed systems. In spite of the fact that consensus is being widely studied in the context of classical networks, few studies have been conducted in order to solve it in the context of dynamic and self-organizing systems characterized by unknown networks. While in a classical network the set of participants is static and known, in a scenario of unknown networks, the set and number of participants are previously unknown. This work goes one step further and studies the problem of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus with Unknown Participants, namely BFT-CUP. This new problem aims at solving consensus in unknown networks with the additional requirement that participants in the system can behave maliciously. This paper presents a solution for BFT-CUP that does not require digital signatures. The algorithms are shown to be optimal in terms of synchrony and knowledge connectivity among participants in the system.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Automation and Systems, Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, SC, Brazil

    Eduardo A. P. Alchieri & Joni da Silva Fraga

  2. Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Alysson Neves Bessani

  3. Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Bahia, BA, Brazil

    Fabíola Greve

Authors
  1. Eduardo A. P. Alchieri
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  2. Alysson Neves Bessani
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  3. Joni da Silva Fraga
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  4. Fabíola Greve
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, 207A Love Building, PO Box 4530, FL 32306-4530, Tallahassee, USA

    Theodore P. Baker

  2. Université de Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 45, avenue des Etats-Unis, 78035, Versailles Cedex, France

    Alain Bui

  3. LIP6 & INRIA Grand Large, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6, 104 avenue du Président Kennedy, 75016, Paris, France

    Sébastien Tixeuil

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Alchieri, E.A.P., Bessani, A.N., da Silva Fraga, J., Greve, F. (2008). Byzantine Consensus with Unknown Participants. In: Baker, T.P., Bui, A., Tixeuil, S. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5401. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92221-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92221-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-92220-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-92221-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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