BCM-Broadcast: A Byzantine-Tolerant Causal Broadcast Algorithm for Distributed Mobile Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces BCM-Broadcast, a Byzantine-tolerant causal broadcast algorithm designed for distributed mobile systems, addressing challenges of Byzantine failures, causality, and mobility with proven safety and linear message complexity.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel hierarchical architecture for BCM-Broadcast that ensures safety, causality, and efficiency in mobile distributed systems with Byzantine failures.

Findings

BCM-Broadcast satisfies key properties including validity, integrity, termination, and causality.

The algorithm guarantees safety if Byzantine nodes are less than one-third of total nodes.

Message complexity of BCM-Broadcast is linear.

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm, called BCM-Broadcast, for the implementation of causal broadcast in distributed mobile systems in the presence of Byzantine failures. The BCM-Broadcast algorithm simultaneously focuses on three critical challenges in distributed systems: Byzantine failures, Causality, and Mobility. We first present a hierarchical architecture for BCM-Broadcast. Then, we define twelve properties for BCM-Broadcast, including validity, integrity, termination, and causality. We then show that BCM-Broadcast satisfies all these properties. We also prove the safety of BCM-Broadcast; i.e., no healthy process delivers a message from any Byzantine process, assuming that the number of Byzantine processes is less than a third of the total number of mobile nodes. Subsequently, we show that the message complexity of BCM-Broadcast is linear. Finally, using the Poisson process, we analyze the probability of the violation of the safety condition under different mobility scenarios.