A Byzantine Fault Tolerant Distributed Commit Protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed commit protocol that enhances the traditional two-phase commit by replicating the coordinator and employing Byzantine agreement, enabling reliable transactions over untrusted networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel protocol that tolerates Byzantine faults at the coordinator and some malicious participant faults, improving transaction reliability in adversarial environments.

Findings

Protocol can tolerate Byzantine faults at coordinator replicas

Uses decision certificates to ensure correct transaction outcomes

Enhances trustworthiness of distributed commits over untrusted networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed commit protocol for transactions running over untrusted networks. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is enhanced by replicating the coordinator and by running a Byzantine agreement algorithm among the coordinator replicas. Our protocol can tolerate Byzantine faults at the coordinator replicas and a subset of malicious faults at the participants. A decision certificate, which includes a set of registration records and a set of votes from participants, is used to facilitate the coordinator replicas to reach a Byzantine agreement on the outcome of each transaction. The certificate also limits the ways a faulty replica can use towards non-atomic termination of transactions, or semantically incorrect transaction outcomes.