Overview#
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (
BFT) is the characteristic of a
Distributed Consensus system that tolerates the class of failures known as the
Byzantine Generals Problem Problem, and the
Two Generals Problems.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a property of Blockchain and many other Distributed Ledger Technology systems.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance is often used in a weak sense, such as assuming that attackers will not participate in collusion,
The underlying communication mechanism is:
- synchronous: the generals have perfectly synchronized clocks and a message is guaranteed to be delivered in one time unit;
- reliable: messages can neither be forged nor corrupted nor lost;
- authenticated: the identity of the sender is known to the receiver; and
- point-to-point: the underlying topology is that of a complete graph.
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