Fault-tolerant Agreement in Synchronous Message-passing Systems

The present book focuses on the way to cope with the uncertainty created by process failures (crash, omission failures and Byzantine behavior) in synchronous message-passing systems (i.e., systems whose progress is governed by the passage of time). To that end, the book considers fundamental problems that distributed synchronous processes have to solve. These fundamental problems concern agreement among processes (if processes are unable to agree in one way or another in presence of failures, no non-trivial problem can be solved). They are consensus, interactive consistency, k-set agreement an