PeerReview: practical accountability for distributed systems

  • Authors:

  • Andreas Haeberlen;Petr Kouznetsov;Peter Druschel

  • Affiliations:

  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany;Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany;Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of twenty-first ACM SIGOPS symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We describe PeerReview, a system that provides accountability in distributed systems. PeerReview ensures that Byzantine faults whose effects are observed by a correct node are eventually detected and irrefutably linked to a faulty node. At the same time, PeerReview ensures that a correct node can always defend itself against false accusations. These guarantees are particularly important for systems that span multiple administrative domains, which may not trust each other.PeerReview works by maintaining a secure record of the messages sent and received by each node. The record isused to automatically detect when a node's behavior deviates from that of a given reference implementation, thus exposing faulty nodes. PeerReview is widely applicable: it only requires that a correct node's actions are deterministic, that nodes can sign messages, and that each node is periodically checked by a correct node. We demonstrate that PeerReview is practical by applying it to three different types of distributed systems: a network filesystem, a peer-to-peer system, and an overlay multicast system.