Achieving agreement among the parties in a distributed system is crucial for maintaining consistent views. This becomes particularly challenging due to the potential for parties’ failures, ranging from benign crashes to malicious (byzantine) behavior.

Byzantine Agreement is an extensively studied problem that tackles this challenge: it seeks to establish agreement on a value amongst a set of n parties even when up to t parties are byzantine. The value agreed upon needs to be meaningful and aligned with the honest parties’ inputs. Standard Byzantine Agreement struggles to meet this requirement in real-world scenarios such as sensors trying to agree on some measurement, blockchain oracles trying to agree on the price of an asset, or robots trying to decide on a meeting point.

A stronger variant of Byzantine Agreement, called Convex Agreement, addresses this limitation by ensuring that the value agreed upon is somewhere in the honest inputs’ “range”, or in the honest inputs’ convex hull. In this talk, we will discuss new findings in the area of Convex Agreement.

About Diana Ghinea

Diana is a Senior Research Associate at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). She has recently finished her PhD in the Distributed Computing group of ETH Zurich. During her studies, Diana has worked on various areas of safety and security in industry, while her main research focus lies in the theory side of fault-tolerant distributed systems (Byzantine Agreement-related problems).

Este evento se impartirá en inglés