Intrusion-Tolerant Dissemination in Large-Scale Systems

Abstract - With the growth of the Internet and increased demand for Web Services has come a heightened need for scalable wide-area group communication systems. The need for trust in such systems and the vulnerability of such systems to attack provide motivation to develop protocols that are intrusion-tolerant and able to provide critical services even during an attack or in the presence of arbitrary faults, errors, and accidents. We present StarblabIT, a new gossip-based group communication system that is scalable and resilient to process and communication failures, including arbitrary (Byzantine) faults and malicious attack. We employ a modular approach to the design, and build on prior work that generalizes the transformation of crash-tolerant protocols to Byzantinetolerant protocols. The StarblabIT protocol avoids the need for signatures on most messages by making use of message digests embedded in a single signed message to achieve efficient and secure message delivery.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: PDPTA
• Authors: Kim Potter Kihlstrom, Robin Elliott, Kelsey Marshman, Aaryn Smith
• Keywords: Arbitrary Faults, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Group Communication System, PDPTA 2008, Scalable Wide-area Group