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Mission critical systems deployed in data centers today are facing more sophisticated failures. Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols are capable of masking these types of failures, but are rarely deployed due to their performance cost and complexity. In this work, we propose a new approach to designing high performance BFT protocols in data centers. By re-examining the ordering responsibility between the network and the BFT protocol, we advocate a new abstraction offered by the data center network infrastructure. Concretely, we design a new authenticated ordered multicast primitive (aom) that provides transferable authentication and non-equivocation guarantees. Feasibility of the design is demonstrated by two hardware implementations of aom- one using HMAC and the other using public key cryptography for authentication - on new-generation programmable switches. We then co-design a new BFT …