Karim Eldefrawy

Cryptography, Cybersecurity, Privacy

Co-founder and CTO at Confidencial.io
2017-2021: SRI
2011-2016: HRL Laboratories
2006-2010: PhD@UC Irvine

Scientific curiosity

Scientific knowledge map · Paper #63

How Byzantine Is a Send Corruption?

Karim Eldefrawy, Julian Loss, and Ben Terner

2022 · 20th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS)

  • Theory

What does the paper try to establish?

In synchronous consensus with Byzantine, receive, and honest-but-faulty send corruptions, what fault thresholds are achievable in expected constant rounds, and how much weaker than Byzantine control is the ability to suppress an honest party's outgoing messages?

What is the proposed answer?

The paper constructs expected-constant-round consensus from all-to-all repair, weak broadcast, weak consensus, graded consensus, and a common coin. It proves security for n greater than t_rcv + 2t_snd + 2t_byz under general send corruption, and for n greater than t_rcv + t_snd + 2t_byz under spotty all-or-none per-round send corruption; the latter threshold is proved optimal, while optimality in the general case remains open.

Six dimensions, kept separate

The chart summarizes documented evidence and process. It is not a correctness probability, confidence score, or ranking, and no composite score is calculated.

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LowMediumHighN/A = not assessed

A smaller value means less documented support for that dimension, not that the paper is false or unimportant.

Epistemic evidence High

The full version defines the model, specifies all subprotocols, proves the general and spotty thresholds, and supplies a matching spotty impossibility; the general threshold remains non-optimal and the proofs are not machine checked.

Synchronous network, corruption modes, strong rushing, PKI, and common coin Expected-constant-round protocol and general-send security theorem Improved spotty-send threshold and matching impossibility
Auditability High

A complete public IACR full text exposes the definitions, protocol pseudocode, theorem statements, and proofs, with official and author-affiliation metadata linked separately.

Research question, thresholds, pathology, and open general-case optimality Expected-constant-round protocol and general-send security theorem Official peer-reviewed publication record
Production provenance Medium

Named authorship, ePrint identity, and peer-reviewed publication establish baseline provenance; roles, revision decisions, proof review, tool/AI use, and author approval of this map are not fully documented.

Research question, thresholds, pathology, and open general-case optimality Official peer-reviewed publication record
External scrutiny Medium

ACNS publication and public availability provide external exposure, but no public review reports, independent proof audit, formal mechanization, or correction history was located.

Official peer-reviewed publication record Author-affiliation summary and publication identity
Reception Low

OpenAlex record W3186077535 reported 5 citations in a DOI-specific query on 2026-07-11; this lies in the rubric's 0-8 range and remains a time-dependent, coverage-limited snapshot.

Dated citation-count snapshot
Contribution significance High

The paper supplies the first claimed sublinear-round consensus result allowing a majority of online faulty parties in the spotty model, proves that threshold optimal, and identifies a structural obstruction for general send faults.

Research question, thresholds, pathology, and open general-case optimality Improved spotty-send threshold and matching impossibility

Assessment: Ai draft author review pending · 2026-07-11 · rubric 0.2. These dimensions describe documented support and process, not truth, correctness, or a universal ranking. No composite score is calculated.

Hierarchical knowledge map

Collapse a branch for a top-level reading, or follow its source links and child nodes to audit the evidence and boundaries underneath it.

paper

How Byzantine is send corruption?

A theory of synchronous consensus under mixed Byzantine, send, and receive corruptions, with expected-constant-round constructions and a tight result for the spotty-send submodel.

Research question, thresholds, pathology, and open general-case optimality
  1. threat model Synchronous mixed-corruption model defined

    Parties communicate over authenticated point-to-point channels with known delay bound; a strongly rushing adaptive adversary may select Byzantine, receive-corrupt, and send-corrupt parties, with overlap counted in each applicable budget.

    Synchronous network, corruption modes, strong rushing, PKI, and common coin
  2. analysis

    Why send faults are unexpectedly strong

    proved and demonstrated

    Selective delivery can give honest and send-corrupt groups incompatible views while both groups' outputs remain constrained; threshold signatures, leader-election techniques, and time-lock-puzzle broadcast do not automatically repair this asymmetry.

    Dolev-Strong lower bound, degradation, and failure of recent techniques
  3. method Consensus construction formally specified

    The construction composes all-to-all FixReceive, weak broadcast, weak consensus, graded consensus, a common coin, and signed decision certificates in a repeated coin-loop.

    Two-round all-to-all FixReceive and zombie detection Weak broadcast, weak consensus, and graded consensus Expected-constant-round protocol and general-send security theorem
    1. component

      All-to-all FixReceive

      specified and proved

      Parties send signed inputs, relay unique first-round messages, and become zombies if too few messages arrive; the proofs ensure a non-zombie party receives honest-origin traffic and propagates honest messages across live views.

      Two-round all-to-all FixReceive and zombie detection
    2. component

      Graded-consensus bridge

      specified and proved

      Weak-consensus outputs are weak-broadcast in parallel; a party chooses the majority bit and assigns grade one only after a large enough support threshold rules out a conflicting live grade-one output.

      Weak broadcast, weak consensus, and graded consensus
  4. claim group Main results proved conditional

    The full version proves validity, consistency, and expected termination under explicit threshold, synchrony, PKI/signature, and common-coin assumptions.

    Expected-constant-round protocol and general-send security theorem Improved spotty-send threshold and matching impossibility

Source index

Locators state the depth of the current audit. PDF page numbers, where present, are one-based file pages; metadata-, summary-, and abstract-bounded records explicitly identify their limitations.

  1. Research question, thresholds, pathology, and open general-case optimality Abstract and Sections 1.1-1.5, PDF pages 1-7
  2. Synchronous network, corruption modes, strong rushing, PKI, and common coin Sections 2.1-2.2, PDF pages 7-10
  3. Dolev-Strong lower bound, degradation, and failure of recent techniques Section 3, PDF pages 11-14
  4. Two-round all-to-all FixReceive and zombie detection Section 4.1 and Protocol 2, PDF pages 14-15
  5. Weak broadcast, weak consensus, and graded consensus Sections 4.2-4.4 and Protocols 3-5, PDF pages 15-21
  6. Expected-constant-round protocol and general-send security theorem Section 4.5, Theorem 3, Protocol 6, and Lemmas 7-11, PDF pages 22-26
  7. Improved spotty-send threshold and matching impossibility Section 5, Theorems 4-5, PDF pages 26-28
  8. Official peer-reviewed publication record ACNS 2022, DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-09234-3_34
  9. Author-affiliation summary and publication identity CISPA publication page, accessed 2026-07-11
  10. Dated citation-count snapshot OpenAlex cited_by_count = 5, queried by DOI on 2026-07-11