Tight Bounds for Shared Memory Systems Accessed by Byzantine Processes

Rebecca Wright
Stevens Institute of Technology

Friday, October 4, 2:00PM
Lieb 3rd floor Conference Room
 

Abstract


We provide efficient constructions and strong lower bounds for shared memory systems accessed by n processes, up to t of which may exhibit Byzantine faults, in a model previously explored by Malkhi et al. (DISC 2000). We show that sticky bits are universal in the Byzantine failure model provided n is at least 3t+1, an improvement over the previous result requiring n to be at least (2t+1)(t+1). Our result follows from a new strong consensus construction that uses sticky bits and tolerates t Byzantine failures among n processes for any n > 3t. (This is the best possible bound on n for strong consensus.) We also present tight bounds on the efficiency of implementations of strong consensus objects from sticky bits and similar primitive objects.

This is joint work with Michael Merritt, Omer Reingold, and Gadi Taubenfeld, and will be appearing in DISC '02.