jghms
commented
6 years ago The byzantine generals problem is mostly used to explain byzantine behavior and fault tolerance. A set of generals surround a city and need to decide on attacking a city which can only be successful if the generals are in consensus on the attack. However, they cannot trust each other. How can we make sure that the attack will be successful and what is the maximum number of corrupt generals that can be tolerated? The answer is if one third or more generals are corrupt, no consensus will be found.
A distributed system is byzantine fault tolerant if it can deal with less than 1 third corrupted nodes that execute byzantine (arbitrary bad behavior like sending invalid or purposely corrupted messages) behavior.