Unifying Byzantine Consensus Algorithms with Weak Interactive Consistency

The paper considers the consensus problem in a partially synchronous system with Byzantine processes. In this context, the literature distinguishes authenticated Byzantine faults, where messages can be signed by the sending process (with the assumption that the signature cannot be forged by any other process), and Byzantine faults, where there is no mechanism for signatures (but the receiver of a message knows the identity of the sender). The paper proposes an abstraction called weak interactive consistency (WIC) that unifies consensus algorithms with and without signed messages. WIC can be implemented with and without signatures.