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CS Professor Saia's paper on scalable Byzantine agreement selected as a best paper at PODC

June 28, 2010

saiaThe paper "Breaking the O(n^2) Bit Barrier: Scalable Byzantine Agreement with an Adaptive Adversary" by Valerie King and Jared Saia was selected to appear in the best paper session at the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) conference. Professor Saia's paper describes an algorithm that solves the Byzantine agreement problem with a significantly less communication than any previous results. The venerable Byzantine agreement problem has applications in many areas including: cloud computing, grid computing, peer-to-peer networks data base systems, sensor networks and game theory. A key novelty of the paper is that it is robust against an adaptive adversary that can choose which nodes to take over at any time during the algorithm, up to taking over up to a 1/3 fraction of the nodes. The full paper along with a formal description of the Byzantine agreement problem is available here.