Byzantine Generals And Building a More Trusted and Resilient World

Consensus, Shamir’s Secret Shares and Multiparty Computation (MPC)

In my work with IOTA, I am privileged to work with some of the best people in the world on building a more trusted world. At the core of this is consensus. For me, our future will be built on trust, and in creating systems which are resilient. And in building trust into every single element of a transaction — from the lowest level of a transaction (in the CPU) to its high level agreement on whether it is valid or not.

As we become ever more dependent on our digital systems, we need to be able to cope with failures and security issues. With industrial systems, these are well defined, as water delivery system must cope with failures in any part of the infrastructure, and also where the security is breached. But in digital systems, we still often rely on a single version of the truth, and if that truth is wrong, then everything that results from it is also wrong.

A few generals

When I worked in an industrial plant, there were systems that check the outputs of the key part of the control system. If something went wrong, you could have another control system to take over. But what happens if that fails, too? In fact, what if an adversary has…