Amnesiac Flooding: Easy to break, hard to escape
Henry Austin, Maximilien Gadouleau, George B. Mertzios, Amitabh Trehan

TL;DR
This paper investigates the properties and robustness of the Amnesiac Flooding broadcast protocol, proving its uniqueness under certain conditions and demonstrating its vulnerability to minimal faults and Byzantine agents.
Contribution
It establishes that Amnesiac Flooding is the only strictly stateless deterministic broadcast protocol satisfying four natural properties, and analyzes its fragility under faults and Byzantine interference.
Findings
Amnesiac Flooding is uniquely characterized by four natural properties.
Minor faults can cause the protocol to become non-terminating or non-broadcasting.
The structure of Byzantine agents capable of disrupting the protocol is characterized.
Abstract
Broadcast is a central problem in distributed computing. Recently, Hussak and Trehan [PODC'19/DC'23] proposed a stateless broadcasting protocol (Amnesiac Flooding), which was surprisingly proven to terminate in asymptotically optimal time (linear in the diameter of the network). However, it remains unclear: (i) Are there other stateless terminating broadcast algorithms with the desirable properties of Amnesiac Flooding, (ii) How robust is Amnesiac Flooding with respect to \emph{faults}? In this paper we make progress on both of these fronts. Under a reasonable restriction (obliviousness to message content) additional to the fault-free synchronous model, we prove that Amnesiac Flooding is the \emph{only} strictly stateless deterministic protocol that can achieve terminating broadcast. We achieve this by identifying four natural properties of a terminating broadcast protocol that…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
