Efficient middleware for byzantine fault tolerant database replication

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) enhances the reliability and availability of replicated systems subject to software bugs, malicious attacks, or other unexpected events. This paper presents Byzantium, a BFT database replication middleware that provides snapshot isolation semantics. It is the first BFT database system that allows for concurrent transaction execution without relying on a centralized component, which is essential for having both performance and robustness. Byzantium builds on an existing BFT library but extends it with a set of techniques for increasing concurrency in the execution of operations, for optimistically executing operations in a single replica, and for striping and load-balancing read operations across replicas. Experimental results show that our replication protocols introduce only a modest performance overhead for read-write dominated workloads and perform better than a non-replicated database system for read-only workloads.