BCRB 2018 introduction

The ability to cope with random faults, unexpected disruptions, and targeted attacks is an increasingly important aspect of dependable systems, which is why Byzantine fault tolerance has become an active field of research in the past two decades. With new application scenarios and technologies such as trusted-computing hardware features, the Internet of Things, and Industry 4.0 emerging, existing approaches towards Byzantine consensus (i.e., Byzantine fault-tolerant replication) need to be revisited. Most notably, this is true with regard to a novel use case of Byzantine consensus that promises a revolution in several aspects of our society: resilient blockchains. The Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB'18) gives researchers a forum to promote and discuss ideas on open challenges in the domain of Byzantine consensus in general and resilient blockchains as well as distributed ledgers in particular. In an effort to foster discussion and information exchange between the two (overlapping) communities, the workshop furthermore aims at determining new application areas for Byzantine fault tolerance and blockchain. Apart from elaborating on further use cases, BCRB '18 gives researchers an opportunity to present system support and techniques for improving the resilience and scalability of Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, for example, by exploiting recently developed hardware mechanisms. Finally, the workshop provides a platform to identify new threat and attack scenarios for Byzantine consensus and blockchain technologies, and to discuss open problems and possible future research directions.