COCA: A secure distributed online certification authority

  • Authors:
  • Lidong Zhou;Fred B. Schneider;Robbert Van Renesse

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

COCA is a fault-tolerant and secure online certification authority that has been built and deployed both in a local area network and in the Internet. Extremely weak assumptions characterize environments in which COCA's protocols execute correctly: no assumption is made about execution speed and message delivery delays; channels are expected to exhibit only intermittent reliability; and with 3t + 1 COCA servers up to t may be faulty or compromised. COCA is the first system to integrate a Byzantine quorum system (used to achieve availability) with proactive recovery (used to defend against mobile adversaries which attack, compromise, and control one replica for a limited period of time before moving on to another). In addition to tackling problems associated with combining fault-tolerance and security, new proactive recovery protocols had to be developed. Experimental results give a quantitative evaluation for the cost and effectiveness of the protocols.