Towards Low Latency State Machine Replication for Uncivil Wide-area Networks

We consider the problem of building state machines in a multi-site environment in which there is lack of trust between sites, but not within a site. This system model recognizes the fact that if a server is attacked, then there are larger issues at play than simply masking the failure of the server. We describe the design principles of a low-latency Byzantine state machine protocol, called RAM, for this system model. RAM also makes judicious use of attested append-only memory (A2M) and uses a rotating leader design to further reduce latency.