Strong Byzantine Agreement with Adaptive Word Complexity

TL;DR

This paper introduces STRONG, a new synchronous protocol for strong Byzantine agreement that achieves adaptive word complexity, improving efficiency by depending on actual faults rather than worst-case bounds.

Contribution

The paper presents the first protocol for SBA with adaptive word complexity, solving the certification challenge efficiently.

Findings

STRONG protocol achieves adaptive word complexity in SBA.

The protocol works among (2 + Omega(1))t + 1 processes.

It demonstrates that adaptive SBA is feasible with efficient certification.

Abstract

The strong Byzantine agreement (SBA) problem is defined among n processes, out of which t < n can be faulty and behave arbitrarily. SBA allows correct (non-faulty) processes to agree on a common value. Moreover, if all correct processes have proposed the same value, only that value can be agreed upon. It has been known for a long time that any solution to the SBA problem incurs quadratic worst-case word complexity; additionally, the bound was known to be tight. However, no existing protocol achieves adaptive word complexity, where the number of exchanged words depends on the actual number of faults, and not on the upper bound. Therefore, it is still unknown whether SBA with adaptive word complexity exists. This paper answers the question in the affirmative. Namely, we introduce STRONG, a synchronous protocol that solves SBA among n = (2 + Omega(1))t + 1 processes and achieves adaptive word complexity. We show that the fundamental challenge of adaptive SBA lies in efficiently solving certification, the problem of obtaining a constant-sized, locally-verifiable proof that a value can safely be decided.