Integrity-Enhancing Replica Coordination for Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems

Abstract: Strong replica consistency is often achieved by writing deterministic applications, or by using a variety of mechanisms to render replicas deterministic. There exists a large body of work on how to render replicas deterministic under the benign fault model. However, when replicas can be subject to malicious faults, most of the previous work is no longer effective. Furthermore, the determinism of the replicas is often considered harmful from the security perspective and for many applications, their integrity strongly depends on the randomness of some of their internal operations. This calls for new approaches towards achieving replica consistency while preserving the replica randomness. In this paper, we present two such approaches. One is based on Byzantine agreement and the other on threshold coin-tossing. Each approach has its strength and weaknesses. We compare the performance of the two approaches and outline their respective best use scenarios.