Byzantine fault tolerance can be fast

Byzantine fault tolerance is important because it can be used to implement highly-available systems that tolerate arbitrary behavior from faulty components. We present a detailed performance evaluation of BFT, a state-machine replication algorithm that tolerates Byzantine faults in asynchronous systems. Our results contradict the common belief that Byzantine fault tolerance is too slow to be used in practice, BFT performs well so that it can be used to implement real systems. We implemented a replicated NFS file system using BFT that performs 2% faster to 24% slower than production implementations of the NFS protocol that are not fault-tolerant.