The Next 700 BFT Protocols

Rachid Guerraoui

Abstract: Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT) has reached a reasonable level of maturity as an appealing, software-based technique, to building robust distributed services with commodity hardware. The current tendency however is to implement a new BFT protocol from scratch for each new application and network environment. This is notoriously difficult. Modern BFT protocols require each more than 20.000 lines of sophisticated C code and proving their correctness involves an entire PhD. Maintainning and testing each new protocol seems just impossible.