Optimized Authenticated Self-synchronizing Byzantine Agreement Protocols

In order to make a dependable distributed computer system resilient to arbitrary failures of its processors, deterministic Byzantine agreement protocols (BAPs) can be applied. Many BAPs found in literature require that communication takes place in synchronized rounds of information exchange and require that all correct processors know the start of the BAP and start the protocol simultaneously. It is hard to satisfy either or both requirements in a distributed system. As a consequence, it is hard to implement the above BAPs in a distributed system. Authenticated self-synchronizing BAPs evade this problem by guaranteeing Byzantine Agreement while allowing arbitrary clock skew between the clocks of the processors and not requiring correct processors to know the start of the BAP. However, authenticated self-synchronizing BAPs require much communication overhead. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce so-called optimized authenticated selfsynchronizing BAPs, that require fewer messages than the existing authenticated self-synchronizing BAPs.