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A paper written by Dr Fabien Dufoulon was recently awarded “best paper” at the Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC).

Dr Dufoulon’s winning paper (entitled “Improved Byzantine Agreement under an Adaptive Adversary”) explores the fundamental problem in fault-tolerant distributed computing known as “byzantine agreement” – which is a method used within distributed systems for components within the system to reach a consensus on a decision when some of the components may be faulty or corrupted. For the byzantine agreement problem, the goal is to design a protocol, or algorithm to allow the “honest” computers following this protocol to agree on a common value, while other malicious computers aim to prevent this from happening by acting in any way possible. Byzantine agreement is crucial to building reliable and secure distributed systems even in the face of unreliable components, allowing the system to function correctly and continue to make consistent decisions.

Protocols for this byzantine agreement problem are at the heart of some, but not all, blockchain protocols such as those used within cryptocurrency. They are also frequently utilised in critical infrastructure management, such as power grids, industrial plants, or air traffic controls. Byzantine protocols are also often used when there is a need to ensure several geo-distributed computers act as a single virtual machine, despite the presence of malicious actors.

Dr Dufoulon’s paper – coauthored with Dr Gopal Pandurangan of the University of Houston – explores how byzantine agreement can be used in the case of an adaptive adversary, whereby the nodes within the system that the malicious party is targeting and affecting is based on the protocol’s execution, rather than in advance. Their paper and approach to this particular byzantine agreement problem heralded an improvement within an area that has seen no advancements in nearly 40 years.

The ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) is a flagship conference centring on the theory, design, analysis, implementation, and application of distributed systems and networks, and has been running since 1982, with this year’s occurring on 16^th-20^th June. Since its inception, several notable Turing awardees have been published within the PODC including Barbara Liskov, Leslie Lamport, and Michael Rabin. This year’s conference was hosted in Santa María Huatulco, Mexico, and welcomed experts in distributed systems from across the globe.

On receiving the award, Dr Dufoulon commented: “I was surprised, but also incredibly grateful to receive this award from the PODC committee. I was also very happy to share the award jointly with the other paper selected by the committee (Byzantine Stable Matching), as it was a great work done by a student whilst undertaking his Master's. It was the first award I have obtained whilst in the distributed computing community and even more generally within my academic career, so I was incredibly honoured to receive the prize this year.”