Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus (PARSEC) Version 2.0
This work addresses the need for reliable and secure consensus protocols in distributed systems, particularly for applications like blockchain, by providing a fully asynchronous and leaderless solution.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving consensus in asynchronous networks with Byzantine faults, presenting a leaderless algorithm that is proven correct with less than one-third faulty nodes and supports dynamic membership.
In this paper we present an open source, fully asynchronous, leaderless algorithm for reaching consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults in an asynchronous network. We prove the algorithm's correctness provided that less than a third of participating nodes are faulty. We also present a way of applying the algorithm to a network with dynamic membership, i.e. a network in which nodes can join and leave at will. The core contribution of this paper is an optimal model in the definition of an asynchronous BFT protocol, and which is resilient to 1/3 byzantine nodes. This model matches an agreement with probability one (unlike some probabilistic methods), and where a common coin is used as a source of randomization so that it respects the FLP impossibility result.