As Secure as Possible Eventual Consistency

Abstract

Eventual consistency (EC) is a relaxed data consistency model that, driven by the CAP theorem, trades prompt consistency for high availability. Although, this model has shown to be promising and greatly adopted by industry, the state of the art only assumes that replicas can crash and recover. However, a Byzantine replica (i.e., arbitrary or malicious) can hamper the eventual convergence of replicas to a global consistent state, thus compromising the entire service. Classical BFT state machine replication protocols cannot solve this problem due to the blocking nature of consensus, something at odd with the availability via replica divergence in the EC model. In this work in progress paper, we introduce a new secure highly available protocol for the EC model that assumes a fraction of replicas and any client can be Byzantine. To respect the essence of EC, the protocol gives priority to high availability, and thus Byzantine detection is performed off the critical path on a consistent data offset. The paper concisely explains the protocol and discusses its feasibility. We aim at presenting a more comprehensive and empirical study in the future.