Zyzzyva: speculative byzantine fault tolerance

Abstract

We present Zyzzyva, a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost and simplify the design of Byzantine fault tolerant state machine replication. In Zyzzyva, replicas respond to a client's request without first running an expensive three-phase commit protocol to reach agreement on the order in which the request must be processed. Instead, they optimistically adopt the order proposed by the primary and respond immediately to the client. Replicas can thus become temporarily inconsistent with one another, but clients detect inconsistencies, help correct replicas converge on a single total ordering of requests, and only rely on responses that are consistent with this total order. This approach allows Zyzzyva to reduce replication overheads to near their theoretical minimal.