Testing the ”Fast Byzantine Consensus” Protocol

Abstract

Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols have been around for decades, offering the guarantee of agreement on a correct value even in the presence of arbitrary failures. These protocols have become a critical part of achieving consensus in distributed systems and are widely used nowadays. As such, we should aim to ensure the correct functioning of these systems and one essential step to take in this direction is by finding systematic and automatic ways to test BFT protocols. This paper evaluates the performance of ByzzFuzz, an automatic testing framework designed to find bugs in the implementation of Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols through randomized testing. In that sense, we evaluate ByzzFuzz’s ability to find bugs in our implementation, compare its method of injecting network and process faults to a baseline method that arbitrarily injects faults and compare the performance in bug detection of small-scope and any-scope message mutations. We implemented the ”Fast Byzantine Consensus” protocol and employed ByzzFuzz to evaluate the framework’s capability of finding implementation bugs. We materialized a liveness violation previously uncovered in a theoretical analysis research.