Impossibility Results for Byzantine-Tolerant State Observation, Synchronization, and Graph Computation Problems

Abstract

This paper considers the solvability of several fundamental problems in asynchronous message-passing distributed systems in the presence of Byzantine processes using distributed algorithms. These problems are the following: mutual exclusion, global snapshot recording, termination detection, deadlock detection, predicate detection, causal ordering, spanning tree construction, minimum spanning tree construction, all–all shortest paths computation, and maximal independent set computation. In a distributed algorithm, each process has access only to its local variables and incident edge parameters. We show the impossibility of solving these fundamental problems by proving that they require a solution to the causality determination problem which has been shown to be unsolvable in asynchronous message-passing distributed systems.

Keywords

• Byzantine fault-tolerance
• “happened before” relation
• causality
• state observation
• synchronization
• graph computation