State Machine Replication Among Strangers, Fast and Self-Sufficient

A set of unacquainted parties, some of which may misbehave, communicate with each other over an unauthenticated and unreliable gossip network. They wish to jointly replicate a state machine Π so that each one of them has fair access to its operation. Specifically, assuming parties’ computational power is measured as queries to an oracle machine H(·), parties can issue symbols to the state machine in proportion to their queries to H(·) at a given fixed rate. Moreover, if such access to the state machine is provided continuously in expected constant time installments we qualify it as fast fairness.

A state machine replication (SMR) protocol in this permissionless setting is expected to offer consistency across parties and reliably process all symbols that honest parties wish to add to it in a timely manner despite continuously fluctuating participation and in the presence of an adversary who commands less than half of the total queries to H(·) per unit of time.

A number of protocols strive to offer the above guarantee together with fast settlement — notably, the Bitcoin blockchain offers a protocol that settles against Byzantine adversaries in polylogarithmic rounds, while fairness only holds in a fail-stop adversarial model (due to the fact that Byzantine behavior can bias access to the state machine in the adversary’s favor). In this work, we put forth the first Byzantine-resilient protocol solving SMR in this setting with both expected-constant-time settlement and fast fairness. Furthermore, our protocol is self-sufficient in the sense of performing its own time keeping while tolerating an adaptively fluctuating set of parties.