Read/write shared memory abstraction on top of asynchronous Byzantine message-passing systems

This paper is on the construction and use of a shared memory abstraction on top of an asynchronous message-passing system in which up to t processes may commit Byzantine failures. This abstraction consists of arrays of n single-writer/multi-reader atomic registers, where n is the number of processes. These registers enable Byzantine tolerance by recording the whole history of values written to each one of them. A distributed algorithm building such a shared memory abstraction is first presented. This algorithm assumes t < n/3, which is shown to be a necessary and sufficient condition for such a construction. Hence, the algorithm is resilient-optimal. Then the paper presents distributed objects built on top of this read/write shared memory abstraction, which cope with Byzantine processes. As illustrated by these objects, the proposed shared memory abstraction is motivated by the fact that, for a lot of problems, algorithms are simpler to design and prove correct in a shared memory system than in a message-passing system. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.