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Since the mid-1980s it has been known that Byzantine Agreement can be solved with probability 1 asynchronously, even against an omniscient, computationally unbounded adversary that can adaptivelycorruptup tof < n/3parties. Moreover, the problem is insoluble withf ≥ n/3corruptions. However, Bracha’s [13] 1984 protocol (see also Ben-Or [8]) achievedf < n/3resilience at the cost ofexponentialexpected latency2^{Θ (n)}, a bound that hasneverbeen improved in this model withf = ⌊ (n-1)/3 ⌋corruptions.

In this article, we prove that Byzantine Agreement in the asynchronous, full information model can be solved with probability 1 against an adaptive adversary that can corruptf < n/3parties, while incurring onlypolynomial latency with high probability. Our protocol follows an earlier polynomial latency protocol of King and Saia [33,34], which hadsuboptimalresilience, namelyf ≈ n/10⁹ [33,34].

Resiliencef = (n-1)/3is uniquely difficult, as this is the point at which the influence of the Byzantine and honest players are of roughly equal strength. The core technical problem we solve is to design a collective coin-flipping protocol thateventuallylets us flip a coin with an unambiguous outcome. In the beginning, the influence of the Byzantine players is too powerful to overcome, and they can essentially fix the coin’s behavior at will. We guarantee that after just a polynomial number of executions of the coin-flipping protocol, either (a) the Byzantine players fail to fix the behavior of the coin (thereby ending the game) or (b) we can “blacklist” players such that the blacklisting rate for Byzantine players is at least as large as the blacklisting rate for good players. The blacklisting criterion is based on a simple statistical test offraud detection.

 

Given an undirected weighted graph with n vertices and m edges, we give the first deterministic m1+o(1)-time algorithm for constructing the cactus representation of all global minimum cuts. This improves the current n2+o(1)-time state-of-the-art deterministic algorithm, which can be obtained by combining ideas implicitly from three papers [22, 27, 12]. The known explicitly stated deterministic algorithm has a runtime of Õ(mn) [9, 34]. Using our technique, we can even speed up the fastest randomized algorithm of [23] whose running time is at least Ω(m log4 n) to O(m log3 n). 

Dynamic connectivity is one of the most fundamental problems in dynamic graphalgorithms. We present a randomized Las Vegas dynamic connectivity datastructure with $O(\log n(\log\log n)^2)$ amortized expected update time and$O(\log n/\log\log\log n)$ worst case query time, which comes very close to thecell probe lower bounds of Patrascu and Demaine (2006) and Patrascu and Thorup(2011).