We are happy to announce that our colleagues from LASIGE, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, won the best paper award at SRDS’21 for a paper that they co-authored, entitled “Making Reads in BFT State Machine Replication Fast, Linearizable, and Live”. Alysson Bessani explains that they “identified a 20-year-old dormant bug on MIT’s PBFT – the most important Byzantine Fault Tolerant State Machine Replication/Consensus – which is used in several permissioned blockchains” and that they “show that the consensus-free read optimisation proposed in PBFT may lead to liveness problems”. Therefore, in this paper they also propose and evaluate a solution, which will be integrated in BFT-SMaRt. BFT-SMaRt is a Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication project developed and mainteined by LASIGE at the University of Lisbon, which is available on GitHub (https://github.com/bft-smart/library). BFT-SMaRt is being used in VEDLIoT as a building block for the implementation of the VEDLIoT trusted membership service, a fundamental component of VEDLIoT security architecture, which requires efficient reads support.
Repository: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11144
