Using Replication and Partitioning to Build Secure Distributed Systems

  • Authors:
  • Lantian Zheng;Stephen Chong;Andrew C. Myers;Steve Zdancewic

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SP '03 Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

A challenging unsolved security problem is how to specifyand enforce system-wide security policies; this problemis even more acute in distributed systems with mutual distrust.This paper describes a way to enforce policies fordata confidentiality and integrity in such an environment.Programs annotated with security specifications are staticallychecked and then transformed by the compiler to runsecurely on a distributed system with untrusted hosts. Thecode and data of the computation are partitioned acrossthe available hosts in accordance with the security specification.The key contribution is automatic replication ofcode and data to increase assurance of integrity-withoutharming confidentiality, and without placing undue trustin any host. The compiler automatically generates securerun-time protocols for communication among the replicatedcode partitions. Results are given from a prototype implementationapplied to various distributed programs.