Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture — Byzantine Fault Tolerance Meets Flexibility

At the heart of the blockchain technology is a mechanism for decentralizing trust, aka Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). BFT replication enables a group of parties, none of which is trusted, to maintain programmable resources such as payment services. 

BFT protocols designed for building replicated services collapse if deployed under settings that differ from the fault model they are designed for. Moving beyond the classical paradigm for BFT replication, we introduce Flexible BFT, a new approach for BFT consensus solution design. Flexible BFT revolves around two pillars. First, flexible BFT introduces a new fault model that allows resilience to higher corruption levels than possible in a pure Byzantine fault model. Second, Flexible BFT separates the fault model and the solution, supporting in the same protocol synchronous and asynchronous beliefs, as well as varying resilience thresholds.

Flexible BFT is joint work with Kartik Nayak and Ling Ren. 

Light refreshments will be served before the lecture at 3:30 p.m.