From Byzantine Fault-Tolerance to Fault-Avoidance: An Architectural Transformation to Attack and Failure Resiliency
Noor O. Ahmed, Bharat Bhargava · IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing · 2018
We present Byzantine Fault-Avoidance (BFA), a fault-resilient architecture designed for Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems to withstand against attacks and failures. BFA allows replicas to short live on a given computing platform, i.e., hardware, hypervisors and OS, to thwart successful and in-progress attacks while simultaneously preserving the correctness condition of BFT properties; safety and liveness. BFA combines the cloud management software stack of OpenStack (nova) and the Software Defined Network (SDN) implementation (neutron) to control the replicas susceptibility window of attack in order to avoid Byzantine faults. The proposed fault-avoidance scheme illustrates the defensive security solutions enabled by the underlying cloud computing fabric are far superior than the ones implemented at the application/protocol level. Preliminary results of widely studied BFT system (BFT-SMaRT) deployed in a cloud infrastructure (OpenStack-Kilo) indicate that BFA achieves desired BFT reliability properties and throughput over contested environments.