Knowledge Connectivity Requirements for Solving BFT Consensus with Unknown Participants and Fault Threshold

Consensus is a fundamental building block for constructing reliable and fault-tolerant distributed services. The increasing demand for high-performance and scalable blockchain protocols has brought attention to solving consensus in scenarios where each participant joins the system knowing only a subset of participants. In such scenarios, the participants' initial knowledge about the existence of other participants can collectively be represented by a directed graph known as knowledge connectivity graph. The Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus with Unknown Participants (BFT-CUP) problem aims to solve consensus in those scenarios by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions that the knowledge connectivity graphs must satisfy when a fault threshold is provided to all participants. This work extends BFT-CUP by eliminating the requirement to provide the fault threshold to the participants. We indeed address the problem of solving BFT consensus in settings where each participant initially knows a subset of participants, and although a fault threshold exists, no participant is provided with this information – referred to as BFT Consensus with Unknown Participants and Fault Threshold (BFT-CUPFT). With this aim, we first demonstrate that the conditions identified for knowledge connectivity graphs by BFT-CUP are insufficient to solve BFT-CUPFT. Accordingly, we introduce a new type of knowledge connectivity graph that is sufficient for solving such a problem. To validate its sufficiency, we design a protocol for solving BFT-CUPFT.