Byzantine agreement and authentication assumptions
Research context
postgraduate concept · established · As of 2026-10-10
In the synchronous oral-message Byzantine-generals model, agreement with at most f faulty participants requires at least 3f+1 participants, with identifiable senders and reliable delivery but no unforgeable transferred signature chain.
Key knowledge
In the synchronous oral-message Byzantine-generals model, agreement with at most f faulty participants requires at least 3f+1 participants, with identifiable senders and reliable delivery but no unforgeable transferred signature chain. Lamport, Shostak and Pease show that signed-message assumptions change the achievable boundary. A crash-majority protocol cannot inherit Byzantine guarantees merely by attaching a signature to each network packet.
Conditions and scope
- The timing, authentication and message-delivery assumptions are the original theorem's; asynchronous and partially synchronous BFT protocols need separate results.
- Unforgeability itself relies on key management and a stated cryptographic security model.
Sources · 1
References
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Evidence and review
Author checked this English statement, displayed equation where present and stated hypotheses against these source locations: Oral-message assumptions and 3m+1 theorem; signed-message model distinction. The check is bounded to the recorded claims; no complete proof reconstruction, software proof replay or universal literature completeness is claimed.
2026-10-10 · Author source-body/statement/equation/domain check, with graph associations scoped individually. Separate independent content/source/inventory review is required before branch closure.
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