Securing information transmission by redundancy
Jun Li, Peter L. Reiher, Gerald J. Popek · 1999
Many approaches have been used or proposed for providing security Ior inlormation dissemination over networks, including encryption, authentication, and digital signafures.These mechanisms do not, however, necessarily help ensure that a message is delivered at all.Attacks that try to destroy or intercept security messal~es require other mechanisms.Authenticated acknowledgements are sometimes useful for this purpose, but do not scale well.This paper discusses the use of redundancy to combat attempts to prevent intbrmation dissemination.Redundancy has been widely used in other areas, such as high availability data storage, file replication, and some faulttolerant systems.The se_curity problem has different characteristics that require different approaches to redundancy.We present one example of using redundancy to increase assurance of security updates delivery.