A note on consensus on dual failure modes

Abstract-Meyer and Pradhan proposed the MS (for “mixed-sum”) algorithm to solve the Byzantine Agreement (BA) problem with dual failure modes: arbitrary faults (Byzantine faults) and dormant faults (essentially omission faults and timing faults) [3]. Our study indicates that this algorithm uses an inappropriate method to eliminate the effects of dormant faults and that the bound on the number of allowable faulty processors is overestimated. This paper corrects the algorithm and gives a new bound for the allowable faulty processors. index Terms-Byzantine Agreement, consensus problem, distributed systems, dual failure modes, fault tolerance, hybrid fault model.