Publication

Rational Agreement in the Presence of Crash Faults

Vincent Gramoli, Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa
2021
Conference Papers

Abstract

Blockchain systems need to solve consensus despite the presence of rational users and failures. The notion of (k, t)-robustness is key to derive impossibility results with k rational players and t faulty players. However, these t faulty players are always considered Byzantine in that they can act arbitrarily. What is less clear is whether these impossibilities hold if these faults are crashes.

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/fa52e355-5aee-4547-b152-a5e008d71668

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Vincent Gramoli, Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa
2021
Conference Papers

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/fa52e355-5aee-4547-b152-a5e008d71668

About this result

Related concepts (19)

Consensus (computer science)

A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires coordinating processes to reach consensus, or agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Example applications of consensus include agreeing on what transactions to commit to a database in which order, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts.

Byzantine fault

A Byzantine fault (also Byzantine generals problem, interactive consistency, source congruency, error avalanche, Byzantine agreement problem, and Byzantine failure) is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine generals problem", developed to describe a situation in which, to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it.

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