A methodology to design arbitrary failure detectors for distributed protocols

Nowadays, there are many protocols able to cope with process crashes, but, unfortunately, a process crash represents only a particular faulty behavior. Handling tougher failures (e.g. sending omission failures, receive omission failures, arbitrary failures) is a real practical challenge due to malicious attacks or unexpected software errors. This is usually achieved either by changing, in an ad hoc manner, the code of a crash resilient protocol or by devising a new protocol from scratch. This paper proposes an alternative methodology to detect processes experiencing arbitrary failures. On this basis, it introduces the notions of liveness failure detector and safety failure detector as two independent software components. With this approach, the nature of failures experienced by processes becomes transparent to the protocol using the components. This methodology brings a few advantages: it makes possible to increase the resilience of a protocol designed in a crash failure context witho...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JSA
• Authors: Roberto Baldoni, Jean-Michel Hélary, Sara Tucci Piergiovanni
• Keywords: Arbitrary Failures, Failure Detectors, JSA 2008, Omission Failures