Byzantine fault tolerance for peer-to-peer collaboration

Slides from a talk at KASTEL Distinguished Lecture Series, given at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany on 19 October 2023.
https://cybersec.kcist.kit.edu/473.php
https://martin.kleppmann.com/2023/10/19/kastel-distinguished-lecture.html

Abstract:

When developing web applications, the number one security rule is that the server should never trust anything it receives from clients. When developing peer-to-peer software, the equivalent rule is that a peer should never trust anything it receives from other peers. Unfortunately, many researchers working on peer-to-peer applications seem to have forgotten this rule. There have been efforts to build, for example, P2P equivalents of Google Docs, but they mostly assume trusted peers that correctly follow the protocol. A malicious peer can easily cause permanent inconsistencies in a document.

This talk will introduce our work-in-progress research on making collaboration software robust against malicious (Byzantine) peers. Hint: there are no consensus algorithms and no blockchains involved!

Transcript

2. Figma
22. 22 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00472
42. work in progress
82. References • M. Kleppmann. Making CRDTs Byzantine Fault Tolerant. PaPoC 2022. doi:10.1145/3517209.3524042 • M. Kleppmann, H. Howard. Byzantine Eventual Consistency and the Fundamental Limits of Peer-to-Peer Databases. Preprint, 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00472 • M. Weidner, M. Kleppmann, D. Hugenroth, A.R. Beresford. Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees. ACM CCS 2021. doi:10.1145/3460120.3484542 • D. Hugenroth, M. Kleppmann, A.R. Beresford. Rollercoaster: An Efficient Group-Multicast Scheme for Mix Networks. USENIX Security 2021 • S.A. Kollmann, M. Kleppmann, A.R. Beresford. Snapdoc: Authenticated snapshots with history privacy in peer-to-peer collaborative editing. PETS 2019. doi:10.2478/popets-2019-0044 • M. Kleppmann, A. Wiggins, P. van Hardenberg, M. McGranaghan. Local- first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud. Onward! 2019. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737 • More at https://martin.kleppmann.com 82