Today I am going to overview a new algorithmic foundation called ‘HotStuff the Linear, Optimal-Resilience, One-Message BFT Devil’ (in short, HotStuff), developed jointly with my colleagues Ittai Abraham and Guy Gueta, and harness it to explain the safety and liveness of Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget.| Professor Dahlia Malkhi
PBFT is a foundational multi-year project led by Barbara Liskov and her students, obtaining major advances in both the theory and practice of Byzantine Fault Tolerance. The PBFT conference version, journal version, Castro’s thesis, Liskov’s talk, and follow-up work on BASE are all required reading for anyone who wants to...| decentralizedthoughts.github.io
We explore a family of broadcast protocols in the authenticated setting in which a designated sender wants to create a delivery-certificate of its input value. After describing the base protocol we call Provable Broadcast ($PB$), we explore the surprising power of simply running $PB$ two times in a row, then...| decentralizedthoughts.github.io
After we fix the communication model, synchrony, asynchrony, or partial synchrony, and a threshold adversary we still have 5 important modeling decisions about the adversary power: The type of corruption (passive, crash, omission, or Byzantine). The computational power of the adversary (unbounded, computational, or fine-grained). The adaptivity of the adversary...| decentralizedthoughts.github.io
In the standard distributed computing model, the communication uncertainty is captured by an adversary that can control the message delays. The communication model defines the limits to the power of the adversary to delay messages. There are three basic communication models: the Synchronous model, the Asynchronous model, and the Partial...| decentralizedthoughts.github.io
We recently published our work HotStuff-2 on eprint, introducing a two-phase HotStuff variant which simultaneously achieves $O(n^2)$ worst-case communication, optimistically linear communication, a two-phase commit regime within a view, and optimistic responsiveness in partially-synchronous BFT. The main takeaway is that two phases are enough for BFT after all. In this...| decentralizedthoughts.github.io
