It’s been a while since we’ve shared academic milestones and/or new technical papers, but today we’re excited to share our newest paper: Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) has attracted a large body of research in distributed trustless systems that ensure the system’s integrity despite of Byzantine processes. Most previous work in BFT systems are mainly aimed to ensure all (honest) processes agree on common knowledge or common state of the network. However, there is a lack of studies about common knowledge of Byzantine faults, such as, whether all honest processes agree on the existence of a Byzantine process.

To improve our understanding in this direction, Fantom has presented a fresh outlook on BFT systems in which processes may misbehave unpredictably. We propose a novel model in which individual Byzantine processes have some probability of cheating. We give several interesting analyses and intuitions of the model in both synchronous and asynchronous BFT systems.

For more details, see our paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03087