Making Byzantine fault tolerant systems tolerate Byzantine faults

  • Authors:

  • Allen Clement;Edmund Wong;Lorenzo Alvisi;Mike Dahlin;Mirco Marchetti

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Texas at Austin;The University of Texas at Austin;The University of Texas at Austin;The University of Texas at Austin;The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'09 Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper argues for a new approach to building Byzantine fault tolerant replication systems. We observe that although recently developed BFT state machine replication protocols are quite fast, they don't tolerate Byzantine faults very well: a single faulty client or server is capable of rendering PBFT, Q/U, HQ, and Zyzzyva virtually unusable. In this paper, we (1) demonstrate that existing protocols are dangerously fragile, (2) define a set of principles for constructing BFT services that remain useful even when Byzantine faults occur, and (3) apply these principles to construct a new protocol, Aardvark. Aardvark can achieve peak performance within 40% of that of the best existing protocol in our tests and provide a significant fraction of that performance when up to f servers and any number of clients are faulty. We observe useful throughputs between 11706 and 38667 requests per second for a broad range of injected faults.