Basil: Breaking up BFT with ACID (transactions)

TL;DR

Basil is a novel leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerant key-value store that uses ACID transactions to achieve high scalability, improved throughput, and robust recovery in the presence of Byzantine actors.

Contribution

Basil introduces a transactional, leaderless BFT system leveraging ACID transactions for scalable, efficient, and robust Byzantine fault tolerance.

Findings

Basil achieves 4-5x throughput improvement over traditional BFT systems.

Basil's throughput drops less than 25% with 30% Byzantine clients.

Basil commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions.

Abstract

This paper presents Basil, the first transactional, leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerant key-value store. Basil leverages ACID transactions to scalably implement the abstraction of a trusted shared log in the presence of Byzantine actors. Unlike traditional BFT approaches, Basil executes non-conflicting operations in parallel and commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions. Basil improves throughput over traditional BFT systems by four to five times, and is only four times slower than TAPIR, a non-Byzantine replicated system. Basil's novel recovery mechanism further minimizes the impact of failures: with 30% Byzantine clients, throughput drops by less than 25% in the worst-case.