Partially authenticated algorithms for Byzantine agreement
Malte Borcherding · Repository KITopen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) · 1996
Byzantine agreement is a fundamental issue in fault-tolerant and secure distributed computing. Protocols solving Byzantine agreement guarantee that a sender can transmit a value to a group of receivers consistently, even if some of the nodes, including the sender, are arbitrarily faulty. In the past, protocols for Byzantine agreement were generally either authenticated or non-authenticated. Non-authenticated protocols make no use of signatures, while in authenticated protocols, all messages have to be signed. Authenticated protocols can tolerate more faults and are more message-efficient than non-authenticated protocols, but they have the disadvantage of timeconsuming signature generation. In this paper, we introduce techniques to reduce the amount of signatures by combining mechanisms from authenticated and nonauthenticated protocols.