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Tight bounds for shared memory systems accessed by Byzantine processes

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Abstract

We provide efficient constructions and tight bounds for shared memory systems accessed by n processes, up to t of which may exhibit Byzantine failures, in a model previously explored by Malkhi et al. [21]. We show that sticky bits are universal in the Byzantine failure model for n ≥ 3t + 1, an improvement over the previous result requiring n ≥ (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 + 1, 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Schools of Mathematics and Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Noga Alon, Michael Merritt, Omer Reingold, Gadi Taubenfeld & Rebecca N. Wright

Authors
  1. Noga Alon
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  2. Michael Merritt
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  3. Omer Reingold
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  4. Gadi Taubenfeld
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  5. Rebecca N. Wright
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Correspondence to Noga Alon.

Additional information

Research supported in part by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, and by the Hermann Minkowski Minerva Center for Geometry at Tel Aviv University.

This work was partially completed while at AT&T Labs and while visiting the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Research supported in part by US-Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant 2002246.

This work was partially completed while visiting AT&T Labs.

This work was partially completed while at AT&T Labs. Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCR-0331584.

A preliminary version of the results presented in this paper appeared in [23].

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Alon, N., Merritt, M., Reingold, O. et al. Tight bounds for shared memory systems accessed by Byzantine processes. Distrib. Comput. 18, 99–109 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-005-0125-8

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