BEAT: Asynchronous BFT Made Practical
Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols for asynch. environments
Friday, October 18, 2019 · 12 - 1 PM
In-Person
·
Information Technology/Engineering : 227
The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents
BEAT: Asynchronous BFT Made Practical
12–1:00pm Friday,18 Oct 2019, ITE 227
State machine replication (SMR) is a fundamental software approach to enabling highly available services in practical distributed systems and cloud computing platforms (e.g., Google’s Chubby and Spanner, Apache ZooKeeper). Its Byzantine failure counterpart, Byzantine fault-tolerant SMR (BFT), has recently regained its prominence, as BFT has been regarded as the model for building permissioned blockchains where the distributed ledgers know each other’s identities but may not trust one another.
Asynchronous BFT protocols are arguably the most appropriate solutions for building high-assurance and intrusion-tolerant permissioned blockchains in wide-area (WAN) environments, as these asynchronous protocols are inherently more robust against timing and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that can be mounted over an unprotected network such as the Internet.
We present BEAT, a set of practical Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols for completely asynchronous environments. BEAT is flexible, versatile, and extensible, consisting of five asynchronous BFT protocols that are designed to meet different goals (e.g., different performance metrics, different application scenarios). Due to modularity in its design, features of these protocols can be mixed to achieve even more meaningful trade-offs between functionality and performance for various applications. Through a 92-instance, five-continent deployment of BEAT on Amazon EC2, we show that BEAT is efficient: roughly, all our BEAT instances significantly outperform, in terms of both latency and throughput, HoneyBadgerBFT, the most efficient asynchronous BFT known.
This is a joint work with Sisi Duan and Michael K. Reiter.
Haibin Zhang is an assistant professor in the CSEE Department at UMBC. He is interested in cloud computing, cryptography, security, privacy, and distributed systems. www.csee.umbc.edu/~hbzhang
email: hbzhang@umbc.edu
Host: Dr. Richard Forno and Dr. Alan T. Sherman
Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1753681.
The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public.