Intrusion-Tolerant Dissemination in Large-Scale Systems.
Kim Potter Kihlstrom, Robin Elliott, Kelsey Marshman, Aaryn Smith · 2008
Abstract- With the growth of the Internet and increased de-mand for Web Services has come a heightened need for scal-able wide-area group communication systems. The need for trust in such systems and the vulnerability of such systems to attack provide motivation to develop protocols that are intrusion-tolerant and able to provide critical services even during an attack or in the presence of arbitrary faults, errors, and accidents. We present StarblabIT, a new gossip-based group com-munication system that is scalable and resilient to process and communication failures, including arbitrary (Byzantine) faults and malicious attack. We employ a modular ap-proach to the design, and build on prior work that generalizes the transformation of crash-tolerant protocols to Byzantine-tolerant protocols. The StarblabIT protocol avoids the need for signatures on most messages by making use of message digests embedded in a single signed message to achieve effi-cient and secure message delivery.