🤖 AI Summary
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant CRDT systems lack evolvable and replicable state management for trust relationships and governance rules. This work proposes a dual-CRDT architecture: a Trust CRDT models governance policies and trust relations as dynamically evolvable CRDT states, while a Data CRDT deterministically reconstructs its state based on this trust configuration, enabling co-evolution of governance and data. By incorporating governance itself into the CRDT state, the design introduces a recursive trust governance model augmented with a Byzantine trust filtering mechanism. A prototype implementation on the Melda/melda-sec platform demonstrates the feasibility of self-consistent, evolvable trust governance in decentralized environments.
📝 Abstract
While CRDTs provide decentralized replication and eventual consistency, Byzantine-resilient deployments require mechanisms for deciding which updates should be trusted and therefore contribute to the reconstructed state. In practice, the trust relationships underlying these decisions may evolve over time as participants join or leave, identities change, and governance rules are revised. However, the information used to make trust decisions is typically managed outside the replicated state itself. This paper introduces a dual-CRDT architecture composed of a \emph{Trust CRDT} and a \emph{Data CRDT}. The Trust CRDT stores and evolves governance information, while the Data CRDT is reconstructed according to the trust configuration derived from the Trust CRDT. Governance therefore becomes replicated state rather than an externally managed artifact. Building upon deterministic reconstruction and Byzantine trust filtering, the proposed model allows trust relationships and governance rules to evolve through ordinary CRDT updates. The resulting architecture provides a recursive governance model in which governance rules determine their own future evolution while simultaneously governing application data. The approach is implemented as a prototype on top of Melda and melda-sec and should be viewed as an initial exploration of decentralized trust governance and evolution for Byzantine-resilient CRDT systems.