Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

1982

The Byzantine Generals Problem

Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak & Marshall Pease

Proves that reaching agreement in the presence of arbitrarily faulty components requires more than two-thirds of participants to be honest.

Before you start

Assumes: no distributed systems background — the problem is posed as a puzzle before any mathematics arrives

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

Practical Byzantine Fault ToleranceMiguel Castro & Barbara Liskov, 1999Shows Byzantine agreement can run fast enough for real storage systems, not just as a theoretical possibility, by optimising the common case where no replica is actually faulty.

Filed under Distributed Systems in Computer Science.