International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols are known to suffer from the scalability issue. Indeed, their performance degrades drastically as the number of replicas $n$ grows. While a long line of work has attempted to achieve the scalability goal, these works can only scale to roughly a hundred replicas.

In this paper, we develop BFT protocols from the so-called committee sampling approach that selects a small committee for consensus and conveys the results to all replicas. Such an approach, however, has been focused on the Byzantine agreement (BA) problem (considering replicas only) instead of the BFT problem (in the client-replica model); also, the approach is mainly of theoretical interest only, as concretely, it works for impractically large $n$.

We build an extremely efficient, scalable, and adaptively secure BFT protocol called Pando in partially synchronous environments based on the committee sampling approach. In particular, we devise novel BFT building blocks targeting scalability, including communication-efficient and computation-efficient consistent broadcast and atomic broadcast protocols.

Pando inherits some inherent issues of committee sampling-based protocols: Pando can only achieve near-optimal resilience (i.e., $f<(1/3-\epsilon)n$, where $f$ is the number of faulty replicas and $\epsilon$ is a small constant), and Pando attains safety and liveness only probabilistically. Interestingly, to make $\epsilon$ come close to 0 (near-optimal resilience), $n$ needs to be sufficiently large but not impractically large, e.g., $n>500$---just what we need for scalable BFT.

Our evaluation on Amazon EC2 shows that in contrast to existing protocols, Pando can easily scale to a thousand replicas in the WAN environment, achieving a throughput of 62.57 ktx/sec.