Bosco: One-Step Byzantine Asynchronous Consensus

Asynchronous Byzantine consensus algorithms are an important primitive for building Byzantine fault-tolerant systems. Algorithms for Byzantine consensus typically require at least two communication steps for decision; in many systems, this imposes a significant performance overhead. In this paper, we show that it is possible to design Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithms that decide in one message latency under contention-free scenarios and still provide strong consistency guarantees when contention occurs. We define two variants of one-step asynchronous Byzantine consensus and show a lower bound on the number of processors needed for each. We present a Byzantine consensus algorithm, Bosco, for asynchronous networks that meets these bounds, even in the face of a strong network adversary.