Pathology

Computer network

Mathematics

Distributed computing

Replication (statistics)

Statistics

Epistemology

Philosophy

Byzantine fault tolerance

Property (philosophy)

Alternative medicine

Simplicity

Protocol (science)

Computer science

Fault tolerance

Medicine

We present HotStuff, a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for the partially synchronous model. Once network communication becomes synchronous, HotStuff enables a correct leader to drive the protocol to consensus at the pace of actual (vs. maximum) network delay--a property called responsiveness---and with communication complexity that is linear in the number of replicas. To our knowledge, HotStuff is the first partially synchronous BFT replication protocol exhibiting these combined properties. Its simplicity enables it to be further pipelined and simplified into a practical, concise protocol for building large-scale replication services.

HotStuff