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Malicious Fault Tolerance: From Theoretical Algorithms to an Efficient Application Development Process

Hans Reiser
( German )

Department of Distributed Systems and Operating Systems, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Martensstrasse 1 91058 Erlangen Germany
tel:
fax: +49-9131-85-28732
reiser@cs.fau.de

Keywords:

distribution frameworks fault tolerance

Abstract:

Tolerating benign faults in distributed systems is a well-understood matter. In many situations however, the common fail-stop abstraction of faults is not adequate. Hardware may fail in a non-predictable way causing arbitrary actions before the system is halted. Software is hardly ever free of bugs and may exhibit unspecified behavior in an unpredictable way. Attacks to exploit security holes of current systems, especially of Internet based systems, are so widespread that they are a significant source of malicious corruption of nodes in distributed applications.

This PhD research aims at proposing a novel architecture and software development process which adequately integrates the handling of malicious faults. In this context it makes the following contributions:

First, it specifies a modular architecture for malicious fault tolerant consensus algorithms. This architecture provides a generic interface to upper layers. It offers an interface to select an appropriate algorithm and configuration via QoS requirements. Furthermore, it includes mechanisms for checkpointing and recovery.

Second, it compares different abstractions for the application developer, analyzing which abstraction fits best for which developer needs, and how they can be implemented using the modular low-level architecture.

Third, it discusses how the application development process for malicious fault tolerant applications may benefit from a generative approach, using a flexible, evolvable software generation and transformation process based on tools developed for our AspectIX project.

The PhD work started: 06/2001

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Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005