Byzantine Agreement and Leader Election: From Classical to the Modern

We will present the fundamentals of Byzantine agreement and leader election problems from a modern perspective. Byzantine fault tolerant protocols are at the heart of secure and robust protocols that can tolerate the presence of malicious nodes in a distributed system, such as a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network, which allows a large number of peers to enter the network with little or no admission control. Such malicious peers acting alone or in collaboration can cause disruption of service in P2P systems. Our tutorial is largely inspired by recent P2P applications like Blockchain and cryptocurrencies that espouse permissionless settings whereby peers can anonymously and dynamically join and leave the network at will. Our presentation will be in three parts. In the first part, we will present the historic foundations of Byzantine agreement and leader election and describe the fundamentals that underlie our modern understanding of these problems. Much of the classical results focus on complete networks where nodes have global knowledge. In the second part, motivated by real-world distributed networks such as P2P networks which are typically sparse and bounded degree with nodes having only local knowledge, we focus on Byzantine protocols for sparse networks. While the first two parts will focus on static settings, motivated by modern applications such as blockchains and cryptocurrencies which operate on dynamic P2P networks, the third part will delve into Byzantine procotols for dynamic networks where nodes continuously join and leave the system. The tutorial will cover various tools and techniques that are useful in designing Byzantine protocols in sparse and dynamic networks and will discuss key open problems in the area.