pBFT-rust

This repository contains a simple implementation of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Algorithm in Rust.

The project is an in-memory key-value store backed by pBFT.

While the implementation aims to be fairly complete (with view change protocol, message forwarding, etc.) this is a learning/fun project, it is not intended nor prepared for production usage. Not all features are implemented, all data lives in memory, and there are likely a lot of edge cases that are not handled.

Running locally

Running multiple replicas locally can easily be done with Overmind (see the Procfile). To do that use:

cd kv-node
overmind start

This will start 5 replicas with built-in dev configuration. The default ports will be [10000-10004].

You can also simply start replicas separately one by one in different sessions:

PBFT_DEV=0 cargo r --bin kv-node
PBFT_DEV=1 cargo r --bin kv-node
...

PBFT_DEV environment variable instructs the program to use built-in configuration for easy development and testing, the value denotes replica id and the correct values are [0-4].

Customization is possible with config files or environment variables.

Usage

After starting nodes, you can access the service with curl.

Set key:

curl localhost:10000/api/v1/kv -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"key":"test_key", "value":"test_value"}'

Get key with consensus based operation:

curl "localhost:10000/api/v1/kv?key=test_key"

Get key from local node state:

curl "localhost:10000/api/v1/kv/local?key=test_key"

For testing/debugging purposes some properties of the node state can be inspected with:

curl localhost:10000/api/v1/pbft/state

Requests can be send to any replica, and will be automatically forwarded to the leader.

Logging

Use RUST_LOG environment variable to customize logging verbosity:

export RUST_LOG=kv_node=debug,pbft_core=debug

Triggering View Change

In order to trigger the view change stop the leader replica (replica0 when starting from scratch):

overmind stop replica0

NOTE: Make sure the replica actually stops (the graceful shutdown may wait for open connections to close). If you are not sure, simply execute the stop command twice, which will issue a SIGKILL.

And send the request to any other node:

curl "localhost:10001/api/v1/kv?key=test_key"

The request will fail, but the view change protocol should kick in in few seconds.

Repeating the request couple of seconds later, should yield correct result.

You can query the state endpoint to ensure the view has changed, and replica1 is the leader now:

curl "localhost:10001/api/v1/pbft/state"

{"replica_state":{"Leader":{"sequence":4}},"view":2,"last_applied":4,"last_stable_checkpoint_sequence":null}

NOTE: There are likely quite a bit of bugs / not handled edge cases.