Carlos Eduardo Alves Carvalho


Dynamic Adaptation of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Protocols


Tese submetida para provas de mestrado em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa.

Abstract

The problem of distributed consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults has received particular attention in recent decades. Today a variety of solution to this problem exist, each optimized for particular execution conditions. Given that, in most cases, real systems operate under dynamic conditions, it is important to develop mechanisms that allow the algorithms to be adapted at runtime or to switch between different algorithms so that is possible to optimize the system to the current conditions.

The problem of dynamic adaptation of consensus algorithms is not new, but the literature is scarce for the Byzantine case and there is no comprehensive comparison of existing solutions. This work has two complementary objectives. First, it studies how the different dynamic adaptation techniques proposed for the crash failure model can be applied in the presence of Byzantine faults. Second, it presents a comparative study of the performance of these switching algorithms in practice. For that purpose, we have implemented the switching algorithms in a common software framework, based on the open source BFT-SMaRt package. Using this common framework we have performed an extensive evaluation that offers useful insights on the practical effects of different mechanisms used to support the run-time switching among Byzantine protocols.


Publicações

Dynamic Adaptation of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Protocols
Carlos Eduardo Alves Carvalho
MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa.
November, 2017.
Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, and extended abstract, and mid-term report.
Adaptação Dinâmica de Protocolos de Consenso Bizantino.
C. Carvalho, D. Porto, L. Rodrigues and A. Bessani.
Actas do nono Simpósio de Informática (Inforum), Lisboa, Portugal, Oct. 2017.
Prémio melhor artigo de estudante INForum 2017.
Available BibTeX, extended report (pdf).
Dynamic Adaptation of Byzantine Consensus Protocols
C. Carvalho, D. Porto, M. Bravo, L. rodrigues
In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Pau, France, April 2018.

Luís Rodrigues