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Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Barbara Liskov: December 3, 2001; Running Time: 00:55:32

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

The increasing reliance of industry and government on online information services makes malicious attacks on these systems more and more attractive and the consequences of such attacks are very serious. This talk will describe a new replication technique that allows services to withstand such Byzantine failures; the system is not only resilient to malicious attacks, but it also can continue to operate correctly in the presence of software bugs.

The new algorithm is of interest for a number of reasons. It is the first approach that allows correct functioning over the lifetime of the system provided the number of Byzantine faults occurring in some small time window (e.g., 5 minutes) is bounded. It supports general applications and works in an asynchronous environment such as the Internet. It also includes a number of important optimizations that allow it to perform well in practice.