LibBFT: A High-Performace Timed Automata Library Collection for Byzantine Fault Tolerance

This paper describes a novel high-performance library collection called libbft, specially designed to deal with byzantine fault tolerance for consensus mechanisms. This library is inspired by timed automata theory, and by the groundbreaking work of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). As case study, we tackle recently proposed consensus algorithms, such as the Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) used on the NEO Blockchain. This library is organized in a multiprogramming language paradigm, being already implemented on C++ and Golang. The library handles states and transitions from regular automata machines, besides timed transitions, activated through conditions, actions and events. We also propose a mathematical notation to represent these elements, and an automatic tool to export the generated state machine into graphviz platform. We also integrate the library with state-of-the-art communication protocols, like the gRPC (Google RPC) and protobuf, which provides efficient and language-independent communication. This paper briefly describes the technological background behind libbft, practical applications and preliminary computational experiments.

I. Introduction

Negotiation protocols are the core of modern society. Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms [1] raised a growing interesting on agents oriented paradigms such as Multi-Agent-Systems (MAS) [2], and the Blockchain [3] ecosystem boosted the industry towards agreements on digital environments [4]. The pioneer work of Lamport [5] on Byzantine generals problem opened an wide range of possibilities for agreements on distributed scenarios. Later, a family of algorithms with leader election was defined inspired on the island of Paxos, also by Lamport [6]. One year later, the brilliant work of Castro & Liskov [7] introduced a practical design of state machine replication using the established concept of Byzantine faults.