From Byzantine Failures to Crash Failures in Message-Passing Systems: a BG Simulation-based approach
Damien Imbs, Michel Raynal, Julien Stainer · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2015
The BG-simulation is a powerful reduction algorithm designed for asynchronous read/write crash-prone systems. It allows a set of $(t+1)$ asynchronous sequential processes to wait-free simulate (i.e., despite the crash of up to $t$ of them) an arbitrary number $n$ of processes under the assumption that at most $t$ of them may crash. The BG simulation shows that, in read/write systems, the crucial parameter is not the number $n$ of processes, but the upper bound $t$ on the number of process crashes. The paper extends the concept of BG simulation to asynchronous message-passing systems prone to Byzantine failures. Byzantine failures are the most general type of failure: a faulty process can exhibit any arbitrary behavior. Because of this, they are also the most difficult to analyze and to handle algorithmically. The main contribution of the paper is a signature-free reduction of Byzantine failures to crash failures. Assuming $t