Proactive recovery in a Byzantine-fault-tolerant system

  • Authors:
  • Miguel Castro;Barbara Liskov

  • Affiliations:
  • Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • OSDI'00 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Symposium on Operating System Design & Implementation - Volume 4
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes an asynchronous state-machine replication system that tolerates Byzantine faults, which can be caused by malicious attacks or software errors. Our system is the first to recover Byzantine-faulty replicas proactively and it performs well because it uses symmetric rather than public-key cryptography for authentication. The recovery mechanism allows us to tolerate any number of faults over the lifetime of the system provided fewer than 1/3 of the replicas become faulty within a window of vulnerability that is small under normal conditions. The window may increase under a denial-of-service attack but we can detect and respond to such attacks. The paper presents results of experiments showing that overall performance is good and that even a small window of vulnerability has little impact on service latency.