Embedding a Deterministic BFT Protocol in a Block DAG

02/18/2021

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by   Maria A. Schett, et al.

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This work formalizes the structure and protocols underlying recent distributed systems leveraging block DAGs, which are essentially encoding Lamport's happened-before relations between blocks, as their core network primitives. We then present an embedding of any deterministic Byzantine fault tolerant protocol 𝒫 to employ a block DAG for interpreting interactions between servers. Our main theorem proves that this embedding maintains all safety and liveness properties of 𝒫. Technically, our theorem is based on the insight that a block DAG merely acts as an efficient reliable point-to-point channel between instances of P while also using 𝒫 for efficient message compression.