Breaking the $O(\sqrt{n})$-Bit Barrier: Byzantine Agreement with Polylog Bits Per Party

Byzantine agreement (BA), the task of $n$ parties to agree on one of their input bits in the face of malicious agents, is a powerful primitive that lies at the core of a vast range of distributed protocols. Interestingly, in protocols with the best overall communication, the demands of the parties are highly unbalanced: the amortized cost is $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per party, but some parties must send $\mathrm{\Omega }(n)$ bits. In best known balanced protocols, the overall communication is sub-optimal, with each party communicating $\tilde O(\sqrt{n})$. In this work, we ask whether asymmetry is inherent for optimizing total communication. Our contributions in this line are as follows:

1. We define a cryptographic primitive, succinctly reconstructed distributed signatures (SRDS), that suffices for constructing $\tilde{O}(1)$ balanced BA. We provide two constructions of SRDS from different cryptographic and Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) assumptions.
2. The SRDS-based BA follows a paradigm of boosting from “almost-everywhere” agreement to full agreement, and does so in a single round. We prove that PKI setup and cryptographic assumptions are necessary for such protocols in which every party sends $o(n)$ messages.
3. We further explore connections between a natural approach toward attaining SRDS and average-case succinct non-interactive argument systems (SNARGs) for a particular type of NP-Complete problems (generalizing Subset-Sum and Subset-Product). Our results provide new approaches forward, as well as limitations and barriers, towards minimizing per-party communication of BA. In particular, we construct the first two BA protocols with $\tilde{O}(1)$ balanced communication, offering a tradeoff between setup and cryptographic assumptions, and answering an open question presented by King and Saia (DISC’09).