Award Abstract #0430510
Byzantine Replication for Trustworthy Systems

NSF Org:	CNS Division of Computer and Network Systems
Initial Amendment Date:	September 10, 2004
Latest Amendment Date:	September 10, 2004
Award Number:	0430510
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Karl N. Levitt CNS Division of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering
Start Date:	September 15, 2004
Expires:	August 31, 2007 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$300000
Investigator(s):	Lorenzo Alvisi lorenzo@cs.utexas.edu (Principal Investigator) Michael Dahlin (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	University of Texas at Austin P.O Box 7726 Austin, TX 78713 512/471-6424
NSF Program(s):	CYBER TRUST
Field Application(s):	0000912 Computer Science
Program Reference Code(s):	HPCC,9215,7254
Program Element Code(s):	7371

ABSTRACT

Proposal number: 0430510

TITLE: Byzantine Replication for Trustworthy Services

Principal Investigator: Lorenzo Alvisi

In a world where economics dictates that few components be rigorously tested or verified, methods for building trustworthy systems from untrustworthy components are essential. An attractive approach toward managing the complexity inherent in building trustworthy distributed systems consists in modeling a compromised component as faulty according to the Byzantine failure model---the weakest of all failure models, which allows faulty components to deviate arbitrarily and maliciously from their correct specification. This research explores the feasibility of this approach, both with respect to its fundamental assumptions and to its engineering viability. On the first front, the focus is on (1) the challenge of conjugating fault-tolerance and privacy by developing a firewall with formally verifiable privacy guarantees and (2) the establishment of a solid, quantitative basis for measuring failure independence of replicas against security attacks in Byzantine fault-tolerant architectures. On the second front, the emphasis is on exploring novel ways to implement Byzantine services that provide low latency, high throughput, and can be quickly and unobtrusively reconfigured to improve their performance in response to changes in the environment in which they operate. Addressing these issues successfully will enable a strategy for assembling untrustworthy components to obtain trustworthy systems. More broadly, the proposed research will impact both graduate and undergraduate curriculum at UT Austin and will contribute towards creating a UT Center for Information Security.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

(Showing: 1 - 8 of 8).

A.S. Aiyer, L. Alvisi, A. Clement, M. Dahlin, J.P. Martin, and C. Porth.  "BAR Fault Tolerance for Cooperative Services (Award Paper),"  Proceedings of the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2005), Brighton, United Kingdom, October 2005,  2005,  p. 45.

A.S. Aiyer, L. Alvisi, and R. Bazzi..  "On the Availability of non-Strict Quorum Systems,"  Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2005), Cracow, Poland, September 2005.,  2005,  p. 48.

Amitanand Aiyer, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Rida Bazzi.  "Byzantine and Multi-Writer K-Quorums,"  Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC'06),  2006,  p. 443.

Harry C. Li, Allen Clement, Edmund L. Wong, Jeff Napper, Indrajit Roy, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Michael Dahlin.  "BAR Gossip,"  Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'06), Seattle, WA, November 2006.,  2006,  p. 191.

J.P. Martin and L. Alvisi.  "Fast Byzantine Consensus (Award Paper),"  Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2005), DCC Symposium, Yokohama, Japan.,  2005,  p. 402.

Jean-Philippe Martin, Lorenzo Alvisi.  "Fast Byzantine Consensus (Extended Journal Version),"  IEEE Transaction on Dependable and Secure Computing,  v.3(3),  2006,  p. 202.

R. Kotla and M. Dahlin.  "High-throughput Byzantine Fault Tolerance,"  Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2004), DCC Symposium, Florence, Italy, June 2004,  2004,  p. 575.

Ramakrishna Kotla, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Michael Dahlin.  "SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System (Award Paper),"  Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference,  2007,  p. 129.


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