”Practical" Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) replication protocols have been an active research area in the last 20 years, with many protocols and prototypes being proposed. Despite of this activity, BFT failed to reach mainstream adoption. In this talk we hypothesise some reasons for that and present our efforts towards building a really practical BFT system -- BFT-SMaRt -- and its evolution for targeting scenarios where BFT can really make a difference: services requiring distributed trust. As a particular example of such scenarios, we present our recent work in using BFT-SMaRt to enhance the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain.

Alysson Bessani is an Associate Professor of the Department of Informatics of the University of Lisboa Faculty of Sciences, Portugal, and a member of LASIGE research unit. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from UEM (Brazil) in 2001, the MSE and PhD in Electrical Engineering from UFSC (Brazil) in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He spent some time as a visiting professor in Carnegie Mellow University (2010) and as a visiting researcher in Microsoft Research Cambridge (2014). Alysson is currently the coordinator of the DiSIEM H2020 project and collaborated in other nine international projects. He is the co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on dependability, security, Byzantine fault tolerance, and cloud storage. More information about him can be found in http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~bessani.