# Byzantine agreement and PBFT

I have just gone through Feldman-Micali, Dolev-Strong, KatzKoo (basically, most of the literature behind Byzantine agreement), however all of their protocols take a really incredible amount of rounds.

Just now, I read about PBFT from CastroLiskov and I realize that they are making a byzantine consensus that just happens in three phases.

• Can someone explain why these two line of work diverge so much?
• Are they tackling the same problem of agreement?
• Could we not use the construction from CastroLiskov to make byzantine agreement?
• Could you please link to the mentioned papers or at least to the paper / technique in question? – SEJPM Apr 12 '17 at 11:10
• @SEJPM I think it's Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance by Castro and Liskov from 1999 – tylo Apr 12 '17 at 11:15

• The assumpions made. e.g. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) by Castro and Liskov assume $n>3t$. But I don't know which other protocols you mean, or what kind of assumpions they are based on. I would speculate they try to get high confidentiality (but no certainty) but allow a higher number of corrupted machines.