[Paper Suggestion] Byzantine Eventual Consistency and the Fundamental Limits of Peer-to-Peer Databases #29
Description
Paper Suggestion
- Title: Byzantine Eventual Consistency and the Fundamental Limits of Peer-to-Peer Databases
- Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.00472
Content Summary
Sybil attacks, in which a large number of adversary-controlled nodes join a network, are a concern for many peer-to-peer database systems, necessitating expensive countermeasures such as proofof-work. However, there is a category of database applications that are, by design, immune to Sybil attacks because they can tolerate arbitrary numbers of Byzantine-faulty nodes. In this paper, we characterize this category of applications using a consistency model we call Byzantine Eventual Consistency (BEC). We introduce an algorithm that guarantees BEC based on Byzantine causal broadcast, prove its correctness, and demonstrate near-optimal performance in a prototype implementation.