Signature-Free Communication and Agreement in the Presence of Byzantine Processes (Tutorial)

Communication and agreement are fundamental abstractions in any distributed system. (If the computing entities do not need to communicate or agree in one way or another, the system is not a distributed system!) This tutorial was devoted to the design of such abstractions built on top of signature-free asynchronous distributed systems prone to Byzantine process failures. It is made up of three parts, each devoted to an abstraction and algorithms that implement it. 1998 ACM Subject Classification C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Network] Distributed Systems – distributed applications, network operating systems, D.4.5 [Operating Systems] Reliability – fault-tolerance, F.1.1 [Computation by Abstract Devices] Models of Computation, Computability theory