Atomic Read/Write Memory in Signature-Free Byzantine Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems

This article presents a signature-free distributed algorithm which builds an atomic read/write shared memory on top of a fully connected peer-to-peer n-process asynchronous message-passing system in which up to t<n/3 processes may commit Byzantine failures. From a conceptual point of view, this algorithm is designed to be as close as possible to the algorithm proposed by Attiya, Bar-Noy and Dolev. J. ACM 42(1), 121–132 (1995), which builds an atomic register in an n-process asynchronous message-passing system where up to t<n/2 processes may crash. The proposed algorithm is particularly simple. It does not use cryptography to cope with Byzantine processes, and is optimal from a t-resilience point of view (t<n/3). A read operation requires O(n) messages, and a write operation requires O(n2) messages.