Revisiting asynchronous fault tolerant computation with optimal resilience

Ittai Abraham, Danny Dolev, Gilad Stern*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The celebrated result of Fischer, Lynch and Paterson is the fundamental lower bound for asynchronous fault tolerant computation: any 1-crash resilient asynchronous agreement protocol must have some (possibly measure zero) probability of not terminating. In 1994, Ben-Or, Kelmer and Rabin published a proof-sketch of a lesser known lower bound for asynchronous fault tolerant computation with optimal resilience in face of a Byzantine adversary: if n≤ 4 t then any t-resilient asynchronous verifiable secret sharing protocol must have some non-zero probability of not terminating. Our main contribution is to revisit this lower bound and provide a rigorous and more general proof. Our second contribution is to show how to avoid this lower bound. We provide a protocol with optimal resilience that is almost surely terminating for a strong common coin functionality. Using this new primitive we provide an almost surely terminating protocol with optimal resilience for asynchronous Byzantine agreement that has a new fair validity property. To the best of our knowledge this is the first asynchronous Byzantine agreement with fair validity in the information theoretic setting.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)333-355
Number of pages23
JournalDistributed Computing
Volume35
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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