Good-case and Bad-case Latency of Unauthenticated Byzantine Broadcast: A Complete Categorization

This paper studies the good-case latency of unauthenticated Byzantine fault-tolerant broadcast, which measures the time it takes for all non-faulty parties to commit given a non-faulty broadcaster. For both asynchrony and synchrony, we show that n ≥ 4f is the tight resilience threshold that separates good-case 2 rounds and 3 rounds. For asynchronous Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB), we also investigate the bad-case latency for all non-faulty parties to commit when the broadcaster is faulty but some non-faulty party commits. We provide matching upper and lower bounds on the resilience threshold of bad-case latency for BRB protocols with optimal good-case latency of 2 rounds. In particular, we show 2 impossibility results and propose 4 asynchronous BRB protocols.