Journal Paper

As distributed workflows increase in complexity, they become more vulnerable to Byzantine faults, wherein components may demonstrate adversarial behavior. Addressing such faults is critical for ensuring system reliability, especially in fields such as MLOps, Blockchain, and quantum computing. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) encompasses concepts wherein systems can continue to operate correctly in the presence of faulty nodes. This paper explores core concepts in Byzantine fault-tolerant systems and discusses their relevance to modern distributed environments, such as serverless approaches applied to scientific workloads, IoT, and APIs that may power 6G and the compute continuum. Several defensive strategies and aggregation techniques are analyzed to underscore their role in alleviating the impact of Byzantine faults. Ultimately, this study highlights the continued significance of Byzantine fault tolerance in safeguarding distributed systems’ resilience, security, and functionality for a new era facing increasing threats.