Steward: Scaling Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication to Wide Area Networks

—This paper presents the first hierarchical Byzantine fault-tolerant replication architecture suitable to systems that span multiple wide area sites. The architecture confines the effects of any malicious replica to its local site, reduces message complexity of wide area communication, and allows read-only queries to be performed locally within a site for the price of additional standard hardware. We present proofs that our algorithm provides safety and liveness properties. A prototype implementation is evaluated over several network topologies and is compared with a flat Byzantine fault-tolerant approach. The experimental results show considerable improvement over flat Byzantine replication algorithms, bringing the performance of Byzantine replication closer to existing benign fault-tolerant replication techniques over wide area networks.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TDSC
• Authors: Yair Amir, Claudiu Danilov, Danny Dolev, Jonathan Kirsch, John Lane, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Josh Olsen, David Zage
• Keywords: Byzantine Fault-tolerant Replication, Fault-tolerant Replication, TDSC 2010, Wide Area