205 research outputs found
Bounding the Impact of Unbounded Attacks in Stabilization
Self-stabilization is a versatile approach to fault-tolerance since it
permits a distributed system to recover from any transient fault that
arbitrarily corrupts the contents of all memories in the system. Byzantine
tolerance is an attractive feature of distributed systems that permits to cope
with arbitrary malicious behaviors. Combining these two properties proved
difficult: it is impossible to contain the spatial impact of Byzantine nodes in
a self-stabilizing context for global tasks such as tree orientation and tree
construction. We present and illustrate a new concept of Byzantine containment
in stabilization. Our property, called Strong Stabilization enables to contain
the impact of Byzantine nodes if they actually perform too many Byzantine
actions. We derive impossibility results for strong stabilization and present
strongly stabilizing protocols for tree orientation and tree construction that
are optimal with respect to the number of Byzantine nodes that can be tolerated
in a self-stabilizing context
Dynamic FTSS in Asynchronous Systems: the Case of Unison
Distributed fault-tolerance can mask the effect of a limited number of
permanent faults, while self-stabilization provides forward recovery after an
arbitrary number of transient fault hit the system. FTSS protocols combine the
best of both worlds since they are simultaneously fault-tolerant and
self-stabilizing. To date, FTSS solutions either consider static (i.e. fixed
point) tasks, or assume synchronous scheduling of the system components. In
this paper, we present the first study of dynamic tasks in asynchronous
systems, considering the unison problem as a benchmark. Unison can be seen as a
local clock synchronization problem as neighbors must maintain digital clocks
at most one time unit away from each other, and increment their own clock value
infinitely often. We present many impossibility results for this difficult
problem and propose a FTSS solution when the problem is solvable that exhibits
optimal fault containment
Minimizing Message Size in Stochastic Communication Patterns: Fast Self-Stabilizing Protocols with 3 bits
This paper considers the basic model of communication, in
which in each round, each agent extracts information from few randomly chosen
agents. We seek to identify the smallest amount of information revealed in each
interaction (message size) that nevertheless allows for efficient and robust
computations of fundamental information dissemination tasks. We focus on the
Majority Bit Dissemination problem that considers a population of agents,
with a designated subset of source agents. Each source agent holds an input bit
and each agent holds an output bit. The goal is to let all agents converge
their output bits on the most frequent input bit of the sources (the majority
bit). Note that the particular case of a single source agent corresponds to the
classical problem of Broadcast. We concentrate on the severe fault-tolerant
context of self-stabilization, in which a correct configuration must be reached
eventually, despite all agents starting the execution with arbitrary initial
states.
We first design a general compiler which can essentially transform any
self-stabilizing algorithm with a certain property that uses -bits
messages to one that uses only -bits messages, while paying only a
small penalty in the running time. By applying this compiler recursively we
then obtain a self-stabilizing Clock Synchronization protocol, in which agents
synchronize their clocks modulo some given integer , within rounds w.h.p., and using messages that contain bits only.
We then employ the new Clock Synchronization tool to obtain a
self-stabilizing Majority Bit Dissemination protocol which converges in time, w.h.p., on every initial configuration, provided that the
ratio of sources supporting the minority opinion is bounded away from half.
Moreover, this protocol also uses only 3 bits per interaction.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure
Towards Optimal Synchronous Counting
Consider a complete communication network of nodes, where the nodes
receive a common clock pulse. We study the synchronous -counting problem:
given any starting state and up to faulty nodes with arbitrary behaviour,
the task is to eventually have all correct nodes counting modulo in
agreement. Thus, we are considering algorithms that are self-stabilizing
despite Byzantine failures. In this work, we give new algorithms for the
synchronous counting problem that (1) are deterministic, (2) have linear
stabilisation time in , (3) use a small number of states, and (4) achieve
almost-optimal resilience. Prior algorithms either resort to randomisation, use
a large number of states, or have poor resilience. In particular, we achieve an
exponential improvement in the space complexity of deterministic algorithms,
while still achieving linear stabilisation time and almost-linear resilience.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure
Parameterizable Byzantine Broadcast in Loosely Connected Networks
We consider the problem of reliably broadcasting information in a multihop
asynchronous network, despite the presence of Byzantine failures: some nodes
are malicious and behave arbitrarly. We focus on non-cryptographic solutions.
Most existing approaches give conditions for perfect reliable broadcast (all
correct nodes deliver the good information), but require a highly connected
network. A probabilistic approach was recently proposed for loosely connected
networks: the Byzantine failures are randomly distributed, and the correct
nodes deliver the good information with high probability. A first solution
require the nodes to initially know their position on the network, which may be
difficult or impossible in self-organizing or dynamic networks. A second
solution relaxed this hypothesis but has much weaker Byzantine tolerance
guarantees. In this paper, we propose a parameterizable broadcast protocol that
does not require nodes to have any knowledge about the network. We give a
deterministic technique to compute a set of nodes that always deliver authentic
information, for a given set of Byzantine failures. Then, we use this technique
to experimentally evaluate our protocol, and show that it significantely
outperforms previous solutions with the same hypotheses. Important disclaimer:
these results have NOT yet been published in an international conference or
journal. This is just a technical report presenting intermediary and incomplete
results. A generalized version of these results may be under submission
Synchronous Counting and Computational Algorithm Design
Consider a complete communication network on nodes, each of which is a
state machine. In synchronous 2-counting, the nodes receive a common clock
pulse and they have to agree on which pulses are "odd" and which are "even". We
require that the solution is self-stabilising (reaching the correct operation
from any initial state) and it tolerates Byzantine failures (nodes that
send arbitrary misinformation). Prior algorithms are expensive to implement in
hardware: they require a source of random bits or a large number of states.
This work consists of two parts. In the first part, we use computational
techniques (often known as synthesis) to construct very compact deterministic
algorithms for the first non-trivial case of . While no algorithm exists
for , we show that as few as 3 states per node are sufficient for all
values . Moreover, the problem cannot be solved with only 2 states per
node for , but there is a 2-state solution for all values .
In the second part, we develop and compare two different approaches for
synthesising synchronous counting algorithms. Both approaches are based on
casting the synthesis problem as a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem
and employing modern SAT-solvers. The difference lies in how to solve the SAT
problem: either in a direct fashion, or incrementally within a counter-example
guided abstraction refinement loop. Empirical results suggest that the former
technique is more efficient if we want to synthesise time-optimal algorithms,
while the latter technique discovers non-optimal algorithms more quickly.Comment: 35 pages, extended and revised versio
Fast self-stabilizing byzantine tolerant digital clock synchronization
Consider a distributed network in which up to a third of the nodes may be Byzantine, and in which the non-faulty nodes may be subject to transient faults that alter their memory in an arbitrary fashion. Within the context of this model, we are interested in the digital clock synchronization problem; which consists of agreeing on bounded integer counters, and increasing these counters regularly. It has been postulated in the past that synchronization cannot be solved in a Byzantine tolerant and self-stabilizing manner. The first solution to this problem had an expected exponential convergence time. Later, a deterministic solution was published with linear convergence time, which is optimal for deterministic solutions. In the current paper we achieve an expected constant convergence time. We thus obtain the optimal probabilistic solution, both in terms of convergence time and in terms of resilience to Byzantine adversaries
A Scalable Byzantine Grid
Modern networks assemble an ever growing number of nodes. However, it remains
difficult to increase the number of channels per node, thus the maximal degree
of the network may be bounded. This is typically the case in grid topology
networks, where each node has at most four neighbors. In this paper, we address
the following issue: if each node is likely to fail in an unpredictable manner,
how can we preserve some global reliability guarantees when the number of nodes
keeps increasing unboundedly ? To be more specific, we consider the problem or
reliably broadcasting information on an asynchronous grid in the presence of
Byzantine failures -- that is, some nodes may have an arbitrary and potentially
malicious behavior. Our requirement is that a constant fraction of correct
nodes remain able to achieve reliable communication. Existing solutions can
only tolerate a fixed number of Byzantine failures if they adopt a worst-case
placement scheme. Besides, if we assume a constant Byzantine ratio (each node
has the same probability to be Byzantine), the probability to have a fatal
placement approaches 1 when the number of nodes increases, and reliability
guarantees collapse. In this paper, we propose the first broadcast protocol
that overcomes these difficulties. First, the number of Byzantine failures that
can be tolerated (if they adopt the worst-case placement) now increases with
the number of nodes. Second, we are able to tolerate a constant Byzantine
ratio, however large the grid may be. In other words, the grid becomes
scalable. This result has important security applications in ultra-large
networks, where each node has a given probability to misbehave.Comment: 17 page
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