A Sufficient Condition for Gaining Belief in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper establishes sufficient conditions enabling agents in Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed systems to infer correct beliefs from their history, facilitating the development of more efficient and provably correct protocols.

Contribution

It introduces a novel set of conditions and a finite-time procedure for agents to infer beliefs, advancing the design of reliable Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols.

Findings

Conditions enable belief inference from history

Finite-time procedure for checking conditions

Supports development of efficient, correct protocols

Abstract

Existing protocols for byzantine fault tolerant distributed systems usually rely on the correct agents' ability to detect faulty agents and/or to detect the occurrence of some event or action on some correct agent. In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions that allow an agent to infer the appropriate beliefs from its history, and a procedure that allows these conditions to be checked in finite time. Our results thus provide essential stepping stones for developing efficient protocols and proving them correct.