Well-formed Properties of Heterogeneous Quorum Systems

Byzantine quorum systems provide higher throughput than proofof-work and incur modest energy consumption. Further, their modern incarnations incorporate personalized and heterogeneous trust. Thus, they are emerging as an appealing candidate for global financial infrastructure. However, since their quorums are not uniform across processes anymore, the properties that they should maintain to support abstractions such as reliable broadcast and consensus are not well-understood. In this paper, we first see a general model of heterogeneous quorum systems where each participant can declare its own quorums, and capture their properties. It has been shown that the two properties quorum intersection and availability are necessary. In this paper, we prove that they are not sufficient. We then define the notion of quorum inclusion, and show that the three conditions together are sufficient: we present reliable broadcast and consensus protocols, and prove their correctness for quorum systems that provide the three properties.