License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2020.9
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-134948
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2021/13494/
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Spiegelman, Alexander ; Rinberg, Arik ; Malkhi, Dahlia

ACE: Abstract Consensus Encapsulation for Liveness Boosting of State Machine Replication

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LIPIcs-OPODIS-2020-9.pdf (2 MB)

Abstract

With the emergence of attack-prone cross-organization systems, providing asynchronous state machine replication (SMR) solutions is no longer a theoretical concern. This paper presents ACE, a framework for the design of such fault tolerant systems. Leveraging a known paradigm for randomized consensus solutions, ACE wraps existing practical solutions and real-life systems, boosting their liveness under adversarial conditions and, at the same time, promoting load balancing and fairness. Boosting is achieved without modifying the overall design or the engineering of these solutions.
ACE is aimed at boosting the prevailing approach for practical fault tolerance. This approach, often named partial synchrony, is based on a leader-based paradigm: a good leader makes progress and a bad leader does no harm. The partial synchrony approach focuses on safety and forgoes liveness under targeted and dynamic attacks. Specifically, an attacker might block specific leaders, e.g., through a denial of service, to prevent progress. ACE provides boosting by running waves of parallel leaders and selecting a winning leader only retroactively, achieving boosting at a linear communication cost increase.
ACE is agnostic to the fault model, inheriting it s failure model from the wrapped solution assumptions. As our evaluation shows, an asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) replication system built with ACE around an existing partially synchronous BFT protocol demonstrates reasonable slow-down compared with the base BFT protocol during faultless synchronous scenarios, yet exhibits significant speedup while the system is under attack.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{spiegelman_et_al:LIPIcs:2021:13494,
  author =	{Alexander Spiegelman and Arik Rinberg and Dahlia Malkhi},
  title =	{{ACE: Abstract Consensus Encapsulation for Liveness Boosting of State Machine Replication}},
  booktitle =	{24th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2020)},
  pages =	{9:1--9:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-176-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{184},
  editor =	{Quentin Bramas and Rotem Oshman and Paolo Romano},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2021/13494},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-134948},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2020.9},
  annote =	{Keywords: Framework, Asynchronous, Consensus boosting, State Machine Replication}
}

Keywords: Framework, Asynchronous, Consensus boosting, State Machine Replication
Collection: 24th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2020)
Issue Date: 2021
Date of publication: 25.01.2021

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