Tractable reliable communication in compromised networks

Reliable communication is a fundamental primitive in distributed systems prone to Byzantine (i.e. arbitrary, and possibly malicious) failures to guarantee the integrity, delivery, and authorship of the messages exchanged between processes. Its practical adoption strongly depends on the system assumptions. Several solutions have been proposed so far in the literature implementing such a primitive, but some lack in scalability and/or demand topological network conditions computationally hard to be verified. This thesis aims to investigate and address some of the open problems and challenges implementing such a communication primitive. Specifically, we analyze how a reliable communication primitive can be implemented in 1) a static distributed system where a subset of processes is compromised, 2) a dynamic distributed system where part of the processes is Byzantine faulty, and 3) a static distributed system where every process can be compromised and recover. We define several more efficient protocols and we characterize alternative network conditions guaranteeing their correctness.