The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Bedrock, a unified platform that streamlines the design, analysis, and implementation of Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocols, enabling comprehensive evaluation and discovery of new protocols.

Contribution

Bedrock provides a novel design space framework for BFT protocols, facilitating analysis, evolution, and discovery of protocols within a unified platform.

Findings

Bedrock enables uniform evaluation of diverse BFT protocols.

The platform uncovers new insights into BFT protocol strengths and weaknesses.

Experimental results validate Bedrock's effectiveness in analyzing and deriving BFT protocols.

Abstract

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures, e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design dimensions from infrastructure settings such as the communication topology, to more technical features such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social choice properties like order-fairness. The proliferation of different BFT protocols has rendered it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocols design, analysis, implementation, and experiments. Bedrock proposes a design space consisting of a set of design choices capturing the trade-offs between different design space dimensions and providing fundamentally new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of BFT protocols. Bedrock enables users to analyze and experiment with BFT protocols within the space of plausible choices, evolve current protocols to design new ones, and even uncover previously unknown protocols. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of Bedrock to uniformly evaluate BFT protocols in new ways that were not possible before due to the diverse assumptions made by these protocols. The results validate Bedrock's ability to analyze and derive BFT protocols.