The property of a distributed system that lets it continue to operate correctly even when some of its components fail in arbitrary or actively malicious ways, including sending conflicting information to different parts of the system, rather than only failing by stopping.
Facts
Core PrincipleTolerating Byzantine faults, in which different symptoms are presented to different observers, including imperfect information on whether a system component has failed. 1 Connections
In Field
Invented
Leslie Lamport co-authored the 1982 paper (with Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease) that formulated the Byzantine Generals Problem and named Byzantine fault tolerance.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Byzantine fault
History section, Byzantine Generals Problem paper
This formulation of the problem, together with some additional results, were presented by the same authors in their 1982 paper
Lead, first sentence
A Byzantine fault is a condition of a system, particularly a distributed computing system, where a fault occurs such that different symptoms are presented to different observers, including imperfect information on whether a system component has failed.
View the SourceFrequently Asked Questions
What makes a Byzantine fault different from a component that simply stops working?
It presents different symptoms to different observers, not a clean stop.
A Byzantine fault does not mean a component just crashes or goes silent. It means the fault presents different symptoms to different observers, including cases where it is unclear whether the component has failed at all, so different parts of the system can end up with conflicting information from the same failing part.
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