Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Extended Version)

TL;DR

ProBFT introduces a probabilistic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol that improves scalability and efficiency by tolerating faults with high probability, using fewer messages and steps than traditional deterministic protocols.

Contribution

It presents ProBFT, a novel probabilistic BFT protocol with reduced message complexity and optimal steps, accommodating more realistic adversaries in permissioned systems.

Findings

ProBFT achieves $O(n\sqrt{n})$ message complexity.

ProBFT tolerates Byzantine faults with high probability.

ProBFT uses only 20% of messages compared to PBFT.

Abstract

Consensus is a fundamental building block for constructing reliable and fault-tolerant distributed services. Many Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols designed for partially synchronous systems adopt a pessimistic approach when dealing with adversaries, ensuring safety in a deterministic way even under the worst-case scenarios that adversaries can create. Following this approach typically results in either an increase in the message complexity (e.g., PBFT) or an increase in the number of communication steps (e.g., HotStuff). In practice, however, adversaries are not as powerful as the ones assumed by these protocols. Furthermore, it might suffice to ensure safety and liveness properties with high probability. In order to accommodate more realistic and optimistic adversaries and improve the scalability of the BFT consensus, we propose ProBFT (Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance). ProBFT is a leader-based probabilistic consensus protocol with a message complexity of $O(n\sqrt{n})$ and an optimal number of communication steps that tolerates Byzantine faults in permissioned partially synchronous systems. It is built on top of well-known primitives, such as probabilistic Byzantine quorums and verifiable random functions. ProBFT guarantees safety and liveness with high probabilities even with faulty leaders, as long as a supermajority of replicas is correct, and using only a fraction of messages employed in PBFT (e.g., $20\%$). We provide a detailed description of ProBFT's protocol and its analysis.