A Byzantine Fault Tolerant Distributed Commit Protocol

This paper presents a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed commit protocol for transactions running over untrusted networks. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is enhanced by replicating the coordinator and by running a Byzantine agreement algorithm among the coordinator replicas. The protocol can tolerate Byzantine faults at the coordinator replicas and a subset of malicious faults at the participants. A decision certificate, which includes a set of registration records and a set of votes from participants, is used to facilitate the coordinator replicas to reach a Byzantine agreement on the outcome of each transaction.