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4th USENIX OSDI Symposium   
[Technical Program]
Proactive Recovery in a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant SystemMiguel Castro and Barbara LiskovMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
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.
Contents:
This research was supported by DARPA under contract F30602-98-1-0237 monitored by the Air Force Research Laboratory. |
This paper was originally published in the
Proceedings of the 4th USENIX OSDI Symposium,
October 23-25, 2000, San Diego, California, USA.
Last changed: 16 Jan. 2002 ml |
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