Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process

Journal of the ACM (JACM)

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 1985, Pages 374-382

  Fischer, Michael J ^a   Lynch, Nancy A ^b   Paterson, Michael S ^c  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Agreement problem; asynchronous system; Byzantine Generals problem; commit problem; consensus problem; distributed computing; fault tolerance; impossibility proof; reliability

Indexed keywords

COMPUTER METATHEORY;

BYZANTINE GENERALS PROBLEM; DISTRIBUTED CONSENSUS; FAULT TOLERANCE;

COMPUTER SYSTEMS, DIGITAL;

EID: 0022045868     PISSN: 00045411     EISSN: 1557735X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1145/3149.214121     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. ATTIYA, C., DOLEV, D., AND GIL, J. Asynchronous Byzantine consensus. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles o!Distributed Computing (Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Aug. 27-29). ACM, New York, 1984, pp. I 19-133.
2. BEN-OR, M. Another advantage of free choice: Completely asynchronous agreement protocols. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug. 17-19). ACM, New York, 1983, pp. 27-30.
3. BRACHA, G. An asynchronous L(n - 1)/3J-resilient consensus protocol. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Aug. 27-29). ACM, New York, 1984, pp. 154-162.
4. BRACHA, G., AND TOUEG, S. Resilient consensus protocols. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug. 17-19). ACM, New York, 1983, pp. 12-26.
5. DEMILLO, R. A., LYNCH, N. A., AND MERRITT, M. J. Cryptographic protocols. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (San Francisco, Calif., May 5-7). ACM, New York, 1982, pp. 383-400.
6. DOLEV, D., AND STRONG, H. R. Distributed commit with bounded waiting. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1982, pp. 53-60.
7. DOLEV, D., AND STRONG, H. R. Polynomial algorithms for multiple processor agreement. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (San Francisco, Calif., May 5-7). ACM, New York, 1982, pp. 401-407.
8. DOLEV, D., FISCHER, M., FOWLER, R., LYNCH, N., AND STRONG, H. R. An efficient algorithm for Byzantine agreement without authentication. Inky Control 52, 3 (1983), 257-274.
9. DOLEV, D., LYNCH, N., PINTER, S., STARK, E., AND WEIHL, W. Reaching approximate agreement in the presence of faults. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1983, pp. 145-154.
10. DWORK, C., LYNCH, N., AND STOCKMEYER, L. Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Aug. 27-29). ACM, New York, 1984, pp. 103-118.
11. FISCHER, M., AND LYNCH. N. A lower bound for the time to assure interactive consistency. In: Proc. Lett. 14, 4 (1982), 183-186.
12. FISCHER, M., LYNCH, N., AND PATERSON, M. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (Atlanta, Ga., Mar. 21-23). ACM, New York, 1983, pp. 1-7.
13. GARCIA-MOLINA, H. Elections in a distributed computing system. IEEE Trans. Comput. C-31, 1 (1982), 48-59.
14. LAMPORT, L., SHOSTAK, R., AND PEASE, M. The Byzantine Generals problem. ACM Trans. Prog. Lang. Syst. 4, 3 (July 1982), 382-401.
15. LAMPSON, B. Replicated Commit. CSL Notebook Entry, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., 1981.
16. LAMPSON, B., AND STURGIS, H. Crash recovery in a distributed data storage system. Manuscript, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., 1979.
17. LINDSAY, B. G., SELINGER, P. G., GALTIERI, C., GRAY, J. N., LORIE, R. A., PRICE, T. G., PUTZOLU, F., TRAIGER, I. L., AND WADE, B. W. Notes on distributed databases. IBM Res. Rep. RJ2571, IBM Research Division, San Jose, Calif., 1979.
18. LYNCH, N., FISCHER, M., AND FOWLER, R. A simple and efficient Byzantine Generals algorithm. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1982, pp. 46-52.
19. PEASE, M., SHOSTAK, R., AND LAMPORT, L. Reaching agreement in the presence of faults. J. ACM 27,2 (Apr. 1980), 228-234.
20. RABIN, M. Randomized Byzantine Generals. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. IEEE, New York, 1983, pp. 403-409.
21. REED, D. Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system. Ph.D. dissertation, Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-205, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.
22. ROSENKRANTZ, D. J., STEARNS, R. E., AND LEWIS, P. M., II. System level concurrency control for distributed database systems. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 3, 2 (June 1978), 178-198.
23. SKEEN, D. A decentralized termination protocol. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1982, pp. 27-32.
24. SKEEN, D., AND STONEBRAKER, M. A formal model of crash recovery in a distributed system. IEEE Trans. Softw. Engineering SE-9, 3 (May 1983), 2 19-228.
25. TOUEG, S. Randomized Byzantine Agreements. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Aug. 27-29). ACM, New York, 1984, pp. 163-178.