Quantum Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a leading consensus mechanism that fuses quantum principles and Byzantine fault-tolerant ones to create agreement while some participants are malicious.
However, as they are, traditional Byzantine fault tolerance protocols are limited to at most only one-third of malicious nodes. We achieve these limits by combining quantum technologies, such as quantum digital signatures and verifiable secret sharing, to provide better security and fault tolerance than existing protocols.
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Early development of QBFT
QBFT is based on classical Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), an important concept in the distributed system domain, which aims at handling arbitrary failures, including malicious actors with a guarantee that the system reaches a consensus.
This work is based on the Byzantine Generals Problem, formalized in the 1980s by Leslie Lamport and colleagues. That paper, explains how a group of parties can reach a consensus even if some are not honest or reliable.
The idea of quantum advancement in fault-tolerant protocols was to find the unique properties of quantum mechanics, entanglement, and quantum superposition, to help the protocols be secure and efficient.
One such protocol is quantum Byzantine protocols which use quantum entanglement and verify secret sharing to provide secure information exchange even when some participants are at a very far distance.
Because quantum states can’t be perfectly cloned or intercepted without detection, quantum-based solutions give stronger guarantees, e.g. unconditional security in contrast to classical BFT protocols.
Quantum BFT has partly been developed to address the novel challenges in distributed systems regarding blockchain networks and quantum key distribution (QKD).
One area of progress is towards overcoming the traditional constraints put on deterministic consensus by the FLP impossibility theorem which says that a deterministic consensus is not possible even in a purely asynchronous system with at least one faulty node.
Some previous limits can be bypassed and communication overhead reduced simultaneously as system integrity is maintained in adversarial environments with quantum protocols like those incorporating verifiable quantum secret sharing (QVSS).
Today, as quantum fault tolerance research advances and as we develop more robust implementations in areas like secure multi-party computation blockchain and quantum-secured communication networks, we will see this.
Working of Quantum Byzantine Fault Tolerance
QBFT uses principles of quantum mechanics to solve the Byzantine Generals Problem where agreement is sought despite bad actors (or participants).
Here’s how it works at a high level, incorporating both classical distributed systems concepts and quantum technologies:
- Quantum Verifiable Secret Sharing (QVSS):
- Under traditional BFT protocols, nodes share secrets securely. With quantum mechanics, QBFT encodes these secrets in quantum states and any attempt to eavesdrop will collapse the quantum state and the eavesdropper’s cause is also detectable.
- Quantum bits (qubits) are shared in such a way that each participant receives a share of a secret. These shares are distributed so that we can only reconstruct the original data if enough honest nodes agree.
- Quantum Communication and Entanglement:
- The qubits are entangled and distributed over participants. Intuitively entanglement ensures that the ‘quantum state’ of the system (spatially across all nodes), is still correlated across all nodes, even when some nodes are malicious. The no-cloning theorem (which says that a perfect copy of unknown quantum states is not possible), means that if any node tries to change the shared state, such tampering is immediately detected.
- Byzantine Agreement Protocol in a Quantum Setting:
- Byzantine agreement is a traditional algorithm without failure that nodes first need to repeatedly exchange information until reaching a consensus. Participants exchange both classical and quantum messages in QBFT.
- By sending quantum signatures, they verify the message is from ‘legitimate’ nodes and has not been tampered with. Quantum measurements, for instance, phase-flip or bit-flip detections, reveal if some nodes interfere, and act maliciously or do not properly communicate with one another.
- Leader Election Using Quantum Coin Flipping:
- Selecting a leader fairly in consensus protocols in the presence of faulty nodes is one challenge. Quantum coin-flipping protocols are used in QBFT to accomplish both the random leader selection and thwart leader manipulation. That makes it relatively efficient to have the decisions of honest nodes be synchronized since malicious nodes cannot bias the outcome.
- Resilience Against Classical and Quantum Attacks:
- QBFT withstands both classical and quantum adversary attacks, unlike classical BFT systems. Honest nodes are protected against the possibility of being intercepted, replicated, or otherwise tampered with, through the guarantees of quantum mechanics. It makes fault tolerance better than possible with classical protocols.
Consensus Process Overview:
- To give their initial states and partial decisions, nodes exchange qubits and classical messages.
- Finally, using quantum checks, participants verify that tampering occurred in no more than a few rounds of message exchange, following the same rules as classical BFT algorithms.
- Finally, if consensus is reached (all honest nodes agree to the outcome) there’s a final decision.
- If consensus cannot be reached, further communication rounds leading to a new leader election occur, otherwise.
Applications and Future Use
Quantum Communication Networks:
We test QBFT protocols on small-scale quantum networks to enhance communication reliability. These networks use quantum entanglement and other quantum properties to reach consensus among nodes no matter how faulty or malicious participants are.
QBFT was recently demonstrated in multiple-use quantum communication setups for high security with no trusted central authorities.
Blockchain and Decentralized Systems:
Blockchain technology has started showing some attention to quantum-secured consensus mechanisms. By adding quantum elements like quantum digital signatures and secure multiparty computation they improve classical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT).
Distributed systems are protected from various attacks that make use of classical communication vulnerabilities. When it’s used with technologies such as IoT or edge computing, QBFT improves resilience and security in blockchain networks.
- For blockchain technologies and quantum secure communications, QBFT is being explored. The general security this provides over classical protocols is particularly important in distributed systems where classical protocols may go awry against quantum adversaries.
- It is a significant step toward the realization of robust mechanisms for building future-proof distributed systems by exploring the interaction of quantum mechanics with Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols.