Fast Asynchronous Consensus with Optimal Resilience

We give randomized agreement algorithms with constant expected running time in asynchronous systems subject to process failures, where up to a minority of processes may fail. We consider three types of process failures: crash, omission, and Byzantine. For crash or omission failures, we solve consensus assuming private channels or a publickey infrastructure, respectively. For Byzantine failures, we solve weak Byzantine agreement assuming a public-key infrastructure and a broadcast primitive called weak sequenced broadcast. We show how to obtain weak sequenced broadcast using a minimal trusted platform module. The presented algorithms are simple, have optimal resilience, and have optimal asymptotic running time. They work against a sophisticated adversary that can adaptively schedule messages, processes, and failures based on the messages seen by faulty processes.