Resource-Efficient Fault and Intrusion Tolerance

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr.-Ing. Tobias Distler; Professor Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Kapitza
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2009 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 157267460

Internet-based services play a more and more central role in our society and supersede conventional infrastructures. At the same time, the complexity of such services as well as the complexity of the hard- and software employed to provide them continuously increases. Despite advanced development techniques, this leads to a growing number of system failures. Moreover, vulnerabilities allow malicious adversaries to attack these services from remote. In the best case, services simply crash but in other cases, the integrity of services can get compromised and incorrect data can gets distributed.Objective of this project is the provisioning of operating and development support for resource-efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant services. Based on results yielded by the first phase of the project, the proposed second phase comprises two main research areas: (1) If BFT systems are supposed to tolerate catastrophes, they have to be distributed worldwide. However, only if the system is able to adapt to the special conditions of such a setting, only if the system is geo-adaptive, existing resources can be used efficiently and required performance can be achieved. The measures strived for in the course of that project reach from a dynamic assignment of roles for replicas and an adaptive state transfer through to extensive reconfigurations of the whole system. (2) In order to facilitate this kind of flexibility, but first of all in order to make efficient use of local resources, the second research area is dedicated to the development of replicas that are able to adapt to the peculiarities of the platforms executing them. Starting from a strict decomposition of single concerns of the employed protocols and from novel execution models, an architecture is to be devised that can exploit the potential of multi-core systems and upcoming non-volatile main memories to improve the efficiency of BFT replicas.In total, the second phase of this projects aims at a resource-efficient geo-adaptive, platform-aware BFT system that is able to minimize or even overcome the gap between the demand for Byzantine fault tolerance and the confined practicability of current proposals.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants