Load and Availability of Byzantine Quorum Systems

(Title originally was "Optimal Byzantine Quorum Systems") Replicated services accessed via quorums enable each access to be performed at only a subset (quorum) of the servers, and achieve consistency across accesses by requiring any two quorums to intersect. Recent, b-masking quorum systems, whose intersections contain at least 2b+1servers, have been proposed to construct replicated services tolerant of b arbitrary (Byzantine) server failures. In this paper we consider a hybrid fault model allowing benign failuyres in addition to the Byzantine ones. We present four novel constructions for b-masking quorum systems, each of which has optimal load (the probability of access of the busiest server) or optimal availability (probability of some quorum surviving failures). To shpw optimality we also prove lower bounds on the load and avialability of any b-masking quorum system in this model.