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Summary: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING, VOL. X, NO. X, MONTH-MONTH 2010. 1
Prime: Byzantine Replication Under Attack
Yair Amir, Member, IEEE, Brian Coan, Jonathan Kirsch, Member, IEEE, John Lane, Member, IEEE
Abstract--Existing Byzantine-resilient replication protocols satisfy two standard correctness criteria, safety and liveness, even in the
presence of Byzantine faults. The runtime performance of these protocols is most commonly assessed in the absence of processor
faults and is usually good in that case. However, in some protocols faulty processors can significantly degrade performance, limiting the
practical utility of these protocols in adversarial environments. This paper demonstrates the extent of performance degradation possible
in some existing protocols that do satisfy liveness and that do perform well absent Byzantine faults. We propose a new performance-
oriented correctness criterion that requires a consistent level of performance, even when the system exhibits Byzantine faults. We
present a new Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol that meets the new correctness criterion and evaluate its performance in
fault-free executions and when under attack.
Index Terms--Fault tolerance, Reliability, Performance
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1 INTRODUCTION
EXISTING Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine repli-
cation protocols are evaluated against two standard
correctness criteria: safety and liveness. Safety means that
correct servers do not make inconsistent ordering de-
cisions, while liveness means that each update to the
replicated state is eventually executed. Most Byzantine
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