PROJECT TITLE :

Knowledge Connectivity Requirements for Solving Byzantine Consensus with Unknown Participants - 2018

ABSTRACT:

Consensus could be a fundamental building block to solve several practical problems that appear on reliable distributed systems. In spite of the very fact that consensus is being widely studied in the context of normal networks, few studies have been conducted so as to resolve it in dynamic and self-organizing systems characterized by unknown networks. Whereas in a customary network the set of participants is static and known, in an unknown network, such set and number of participants are previously unknown. This work studies the problem of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus with Unknown Participants, specifically BFT-CUP. This new problem aims at solving consensus in unknown networks with the additional demand that participants in the system might behave maliciously. It presents the mandatory and sufficient data connectivity conditions in order to unravel BFT-CUP below minimal synchrony needs. During this way, it proposes algorithms that are shown to be optimal in terms of synchrony and data connectivity among participants within the system.