Vivisecting the Dissection: On the Role of Trusted Components in BFT Protocols

Bessani , Correia M, Distler T, Kapitza R, Esteves-Verissimo P, Yu J (2026)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Journal article, Original article

Publication year: 2026

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Computers Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Pages Range: 1-8

DOI: 10.1109/TC.2026.3715788

Abstract

A paper by Gupta et al. (EuroSys ’23) challenged the usefulness of trusted component (TC) based Byzantine faulttolerant (BFT) protocols to lower the replica group size from 3f + 1 to 2f + 1, identifying three limitations of such protocols and proposing that TCs should be used instead to improve the performance of BFT protocols. Here, we point out flaws in both arguments and advocate that the most worthwhile use of TCs in BFT protocols is indeed to make them as resilient as crash fault-tolerant (CFT) protocols, which can tolerate up to f faulty replicas using 2f + 1 replicas.

Involved external institutions

Autonomous University of Lisbon / Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa PT Portugal (PT) Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg DE Germany (DE) University of Sydney (USYD) AU Australia (AU)

How to cite

APA:

Bessani, ., Correia, M., Distler, T., Kapitza, R., Esteves-Verissimo, P., & Yu, J. (2026). Vivisecting the Dissection: On the Role of Trusted Components in BFT Protocols. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2026.3715788

MLA:

Bessani, , et al. "Vivisecting the Dissection: On the Role of Trusted Components in BFT Protocols." IEEE Transactions on Computers (2026): 1-8.

BibTeX: Download