Distributed computability in Byzantine asynchronous systems

In this work, we extend the topology-based approach for characterizing computability in asynchronous crash-failure distributed systems to asynchronous Byzantine systems. We give the first theorem with necessary and sufficient conditions to solve arbitrary tasks in asynchronous Byzantine systems where an adversary chooses faulty processes. For colorless tasks, an important subclass of distributed problems, the general result reduces to an elegant model that effectively captures the relation between the number of processes, the number of failures, as well as the topological structure of the task's simplicial complexes.

Authors

• Hammurabi Mendes
• Christine Tasson
• Maurice Herlihy

Keywords

• Byzantine failures
• asynchronous systems
• colorless tasks
• combinatorial topology
• computability