Blockchain Fault Tolerance
In this paper, we assess the fault tolerance of blockchain. To this end, we inject failures in controlled deployments of five modern blockchain systems.
Rachid Guerraoui, EPFL
Blockchain promises to make online services more fault tolerant due to their inherent distributed nature. Their ability to execute arbitrary programs in different geo-distributed regions and on diverse operating systems make them an alternative of choice to our dependence on unique software whose recent failure affected 8.5 million machines. As of today, it remains, however, unclear whether blockchains can truly tolerate failures.
We introduce a novel sensitivity metric, interesting in its own right, as the difference between the integrals of two cumulative distribution functions, one obtained in a baseline environment and one obtained in an adversarial environment.
This paper was co-authored by our CTO and Founder, Professor Vincent Gramoli.
Professor Vincent Gramoli is a full professor at the University of Sydney. He is a researcher in the field of distributed systems and algorithms, with a focus on the design and analysis of distributed systems and algorithms for shared memory and data-centric systems, including distributed hash tables, distributed shared memory and transactional memory. He has published numerous papers in top-tier conferences and journals in the field and has received several awards for his research. He is also currently serving as the Head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.