Multichain consensus roundrobin

Question

I read that mining part of multichain blockchain white paper. It used round robin which possible to adjust by multichain parameter from genesis block.
My question is : Is the round robin consensus is crash tolerant, or byzantine fault tolerant at all ? I read Rafle consensus, it looks so similar to the one that multichain introduce, by voting, but is it not crash tolerant or byzantine fault tolerant at all.

Answer 1

MultiChain is tolerant to a maliciously misbehaving (minority of) nodes, rather than only tolerant to crashes. It is not tolerant to a global network-level attack in which the network as a whole is manipulating message timing. I won't use the term "Byzantine Fault Tolerant" because in an academic setting this is generally intended to include tolerance against network-level timing attacks, but in a practical sense it is indeed secure in this way.

Comments

As I know a maliciously misbehaving node is Byzantine node. Thus this mean that multichain consensus is Byzantine tolerant ?

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Yes, it is tolerant to maliciously misbehaving nodes. But in the academic literature, "Byzantine Fault Tolerance" covers additional scenarios, including global network-level timing attacks. If you apply this stringent criterion, bitcoin's consensus algorithm is also not formally BFT.