Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process

  • Authors:
  • Michael J. Fischer;Nancy A. Lynch;Michael S. Paterson

  • Affiliations:
  • Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts;University of Warwick, Coventry, England

  • Venue:
  • PODS '83 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems
  • Year:
  • 1983

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Abstract

The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value. We show that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the "Byzantine Generals" problem.