Fault-Tolerant Distributed Consensus in Synchronous Networks (Information Security and Cryptography)

Fault-tolerant distributed consensus is a fundamental concept, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing. Ever since the inception of the problem by Lamport et al in 1982, the problem has been widely studied, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing community and several fundamental results have been obtained regarding the possibility, feasibility and optimality of the consensus protocols in various network models and adversarial settings. The problem has generated revived interest from several other communities over the last few years, after the advent of Blockchain protocols. Traditionally, the consensus protocols are studied either in the synchronous or in the asynchronous communication setting and very often the protocols in the former category serve as the basis for the protocols in the latter category. The focus of this book will be on the synchronous communication setting. The book presents all the seminal possibility and feasibility results in this model ever since the inception of the consensus problem, with formal security proofs. Even though the synchronous corruption model may seem weaker than the more practical asynchronous communication model, designing protocols in the synchronous model turns out to be non-trivial and demands sophisticated and highly advanced techniques. Moreover, understanding protocols in the synchronous setting often constitutes the first stepping stone to understanding the more complex asynchronous consensus protocols. The topic of synchronous consensus protocols in itself is a very vast and important topic to be covered in a single book.

Arpita Patra: Arpita Patra is presently an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science.   She previously held several industry positions, such as (a) visiting faculty at Silence Laboratories, Singapore, in the summer of 2024 and (b) visiting faculty researcher at Google Research between 2022-2023. Her area of interest is Cryptography, focusing on theoretical and practical aspects of secure multiparty computation protocols. She received her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and held post-doctoral positions at the University of Bristol, UK, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Aarhus University, Denmark.  Her research has been recognized with the Prof. S. K. Chatterjee Award for Outstanding Woman Researcher or Industry Leader 2023 by IISc (2023), Google Privacy Research Faculty Award 2023, J P Morgan Chase Faculty Award 2022, SONY Faculty Innovation Award 2021, Google Research Award 2020,  NASI Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award 2018,   SERB Women Excellence award 2016,  INAE Young Engineer award 2016 and associateships with various scientific bodies such as Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). She has co-authored a research monogram on Multi-party Computation titled “Secure Multiparty Computation against Passive Adversaries”.

Ashish Choudhury: Ashish Choudhury received his PhD in Computer Science from IIT Madras, India. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Bristol and the Indian Statistical Institute. Dr. Choudhury received the Infosys Foundation Career Development Chair Professor award and the Visvesvaraya Young Faculty Research Fellow award. He has been selected for the ACM India eminent speaker program. His research interest is in the theoretical aspect of cryptography, with a special focus on designing and analyzing multi-party computation protocols. He has offered multiple courses on cryptography and secure multiparty computation on NPTEL, a project funded by the Govt. of India, which offers free online courses in various science and engineering disciplines. He has co-authored a book titled "Secure Multi-Party Computation Against Passive Adversaries".