The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure
A new preprint introduces Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (EBFT), a model that addresses a novel failure mode in consensus systems with agentic validators. The paper formalizes how protocol-compliant agents can collectively endorse semantically invalid transitions due to reasoning errors, a phenomenon termed the Honest Quorum Problem. EBFT extends traditional Byzantine fault tolerance by introducing confidence-indexed bounds for coherent invalid endorsements and unusable support, and derives new quorum-threshold conditions for safety and liveness.
Why it matters: This work identifies and formalizes a previously underappreciated risk in AI-driven consensus systems, where reasoning errors among honest agents can undermine the safety guarantees of distributed infrastructure.
Full story at: arXiv Multiagent Systems ↗