A Fully-Distributed Scalable Peer-to-Peer Protocol for Byzantine-Resilient Distributed Hash Tables

Abstract

Performing computation in the presence of faulty and malicious nodes is a central problem in distributed computing. Over 35 years ago, Dwork, Peleg, Pippenger, and Upfal [STOC 1986, SICOMP 1988] studied the fundamental Byzantine agreement problem in sparse, bounded degree networks and presented the first protocol that achieved almost-everywhere agreement among good nodes. However, this protocol and several subsequent protocols including that of King, Saia, Sanwalani, and Vee [FOCS 2006] had the drawback that they were not fully-distributed - in those protocols, nodes are required to have initial knowledge of the entire network topology. This drawback makes such protocols not applicable to real-world communication networks such as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which are typically sparse and bounded degree and where nodes initially have only local knowledge of themselves and of their neighbors.