The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocols Analysis, Implementation, and Experimentation

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols cover a broad spectrum of design dimensions from infrastructure settings, such as the communication topology, to more technical features, such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social choice properties like order-fairness. The proliferation of different protocols has made it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocols analysis, implementation, and experimentation. Bedrock proposes a design space consisting of a set of dimensions and explores several design choices that capture the trade-offs between different design space dimensions. Within Bedrock, a wide range of BFT protocols can be implemented and uniformly evaluated under a unified deployment environment.