The Byzantine Generals Problem
Understand consensus when nodes can exhibit arbitrary behavior.
We'll cover the following...
At this point, we know that if a network can lose messages, the consensus is not guaranteed; or if a network can arbitrarily delay messages or nodes have arbitrarily long pauses, then a single crash failure can hinder achieving consensus. In this lesson, we’ll see a scenario where we assume that the network is non-faulty, but nodes can have serious (and hard to detect) Byzantine failures. We want to see if consensus is possible when Byzantine failures are possible in a non-faulty network.
Problem setup
The Byzantine general’s problem has multiple generals (three shown in the picture below) who want to generate consensus about attacking a city. The challenge here is that some number of generals are traitors who ...
