FB’s Calibra Team Published New Byzantine Fault Tolerance Method

FB’s Calibra team has just published a new research paper with the new method for Byzantine Fault tolerance method testing dubbed ‘’Twins.’’ In our cryptocurrency news today, we take a closer look at what can the new method bring to the crypto ecosystem.

The Calibra innovation method comprises a lightweight method for testing the Byzantine Fault Tolerance implementation. The research paper outlines that the BFT systems ‘’have seen an extensive study for more than two decades’’ and they lack a principled strategy for testing the BFT implementations. The testing method runs two instances of the node with the same identity which include double voting, losing internal state, and including equivocation.

The FB’s Calibra team assets that Twins allows the operator to ‘’systematically generate Byzantine attack scenarios at scale, execute them in a controlled manner, and check for desired protocol properties.’’ BFT is an old concept that was first outlined in a 1982 paper by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease.

The metaphor described a situation where a group of Byzantine generals and the forces surround a castle and are ready to attack. All of the parties have to attack at the same time but they are aware of a traitor among them which makes it hard for the forces to act together. The metaphor refers to the challenge in a network that seeks to coordinate among the threat of malicious actors that aim to cause disruptions by transmitting fake data.  Bitcoin achieves the Byzantine fault tolerance with its proof of work mining algorithm which demands huge resource investments in order to exert a small influence on the network.

The research paper also outlined the use of Twins to recreate a few attacks on the BFT protocols which determine two of the attacks which ‘’took the community more than a decade to discover’’ while using the Twins it would be identified within minutes. The co-creator of Calibra David Marcus tweeted:

 “One of my greatest joys at work is getting to work with some of the brightest and most capable people in the industry. Here’s some cutting edge work on testing BFT implementations by our mighty research team.”

The paper asserts that many Byzantine seniors can be identified by using the system, but the authors concede that some behaviors are not covered by Twins including those that don’t adhere when the nods act deterministically according to the previous behavior.