Improving Byzantine Protocols with Secure Computational Components

Byzantine-tolerant protocols are currently being used as building blocks in the construction of secure applications, therefore their performance has a practical impact. Work in message-passing distributed protocols typically considers a set of nodes interconnected by a network. This paper investigates the benefits for the performance of Byzantine-tolerant protocols of including a secure component in the nodes. We have been exploring this kind of hybrid fault models by calling these subsystems wormholes. The present paper follows this line but considers local wormholes, while in previous work wormholes were distributed, i.e., they included their own communication channel. The paper presents the architecture of systems with local wormholes and several flavors of consensus based on this model. The paper also presents the first work with asynchronous wormholes, using randomization to circumvent FLP, while also providing the first formalization of wormholes-based protocols using I/O automata. The benefits of the approach are discusse