Stabilizing Server-Based Storage in Byzantine Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems

A stabilizing Byzantine single-writer single-reader (SWSR) regular register, which stabilizes after the first invoked write operation, is first presented. Then, new/old ordering inversions are eliminated by the use of a (bounded) sequence number for writes, obtaining a practically stabilizing SWSR atomic register. A practically stabilizing Byzantine single-writer multi-reader (SWMR) atomic register is then obtained by using several copies of SWSR atomic registers. Finally, bounded time-stamps, with a time-stamp per writer, together with SWMR atomic registers, are used to construct a practically stabilizing Byzantine multi-writer multi-reader (MWMR) atomic register. In a system of $n$ servers implementing an atomic register, and in addition to transient failures, the constructions tolerate t<n/8 Byzantine servers if communication is asynchronous, and t<n/3 Byzantine servers if it is synchronous. The noteworthy feature of the proposed algorithms is that (to our knowledge) these are the first that build an atomic read/write storage on top of asynchronous servers prone to transient failures, and where up to t of them can be Byzantine

Optimal self-stabilizing mobile byzantine-tolerant regular register with bounded timestamps

This paper proposes the first implementation of a self-stabilizing regular register emulated by n servers that is tolerant to both Mobile Byzantine Agents and transient failures in a round-free synchronous model. Differently from existing Mobile Byzantine Tolerant register implementations, this paper considers a weaker model where: (i) the computation of the servers is decoupled from the movements of the Byzantine agents, i.e., movements may happen before, concurrently, or after the generation or the delivery of a message, and (ii) servers are not aware of their failure state i.e., they do not know if and when they have been corrupted by a Mobile Byzantine agent. The proposed protocol tolerates (i) any finite number of transient failures, and (ii) up to f Mobile Byzantine agents. In addition, our implementation uses bounded timestamps from the Z13 domain and it is optimal with respect to the number of servers needed to tolerate f Mobile Byzantine agents in the given model (i.e., n&gt;6f when Δ=2δ, and n&gt;8f when Δ=δ, where Δ represents the period at which the Byzantine agents move and δ is the upper bound on the communication latency)

Optimal mobile byzantine fault tolerant distributed storage: [Extended Abstract]

We present an optimal emulation of a server based regular read/write storage in a synchronous round-free messagepassing system that is subject to mobile Byzantine failures and prove that the problem is impossible to solve in asynchronous settings. In a system with n servers implementing a regular register, our construction tolerates faults (or attacks) that can be abstracted by agents that are moved (in an arbitrary and unforeseen manner) by a computationally unbounded adversary from a server to another in order to deviate the server's computation. When a server is infected by an adversarial agent, it behaves arbitrarily until the adversary decides to "move" the agent to another server. We investigate the case where the movements of the mobile Byzantine agents are decided by the adversary and are completely decoupled from the message communication delay. Our emulation spans two awareness models: servers with and without self-diagnosis mechanism. In the first case servers are aware that the mobile Byzantine agent has left and hence they can stop running the protocol until they recover a correct state while in the second case, servers are not aware of their faulty state and continue to run the protocol using an incorrect local state. Our results, proven optimal with respect to the threshold of the tolerated mobile Byzantine faults in the first model, are significantly different from the round-based synchronous models. Another interesting side result of our study is that, contrary to the round-based synchronous consensus implementation for systems prone to mobile Byzantine faults, our storage emulation does not rely on the necessity of a core of correct processes all along the computation. That is, every server in the system can be compromised by the mobile Byzantine agents at some point in the computation. This leads to another interesting conclusion: storage is easier than consensus in synchronous settings, when the system is hit by mobile Byzantine failures

Blockchains and the commons

Blockchain phenomena is similar to the last century gold rush. Blockchain technologies are publicized as being the technical solution for fully decentralizing activities that were for centuries centralized such as administration and banking. Therefore, prominent socio-economical actors all over the world are attracted and ready to invest in these technologies. Despite their large publicity, blockchains are far from being a technology ready to be used in critical economical applications and scientists multiply their effort in warning about the risks of using this technology before understanding and fully mastering it. That is, a blockchain technology evolves in a complex environment where rational and irrational behaviors are melted with faults and attacks. This position paper advocates that the theoretical foundations of blockchains should be a cross research between classical distributed systems, distributed cryptography, self-organized micro-economies, game theory and formal methods. We discuss in the following a set of open research directions interesting in this context

Reliable Broadcast despite Mobile Byzantine Faults

We investigate the solvability of the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast and Byzantine Broadcast Channel problems in distributed systems affected by Mobile Byzantine Faults. We show that both problems are not solvable even in one of the most constrained system models for mobile Byzantine faults defined so far. By endowing processes with an additional local failure oracle, we provide a solution to the Byzantine Broadcast Channel problem

Tractable reliable communication in compromised networks

Reliable communication is a fundamental primitive in distributed systems prone to Byzantine (i.e. arbitrary, and possibly malicious) failures to guarantee the integrity, delivery, and authorship of the messages exchanged between processes. Its practical adoption strongly depends on the system assumptions. Several solutions have been proposed so far in the literature implementing such a primitive, but some lack in scalability and/or demand topological network conditions computationally hard to be verified. This thesis aims to investigate and address some of the open problems and challenges implementing such a communication primitive. Specifically, we analyze how a reliable communication primitive can be implemented in 1) a static distributed system where a subset of processes is compromised, 2) a dynamic distributed system where part of the processes is Byzantine faulty, and 3) a static distributed system where every process can be compromised and recover. We define several more efficient protocols and we characterize alternative network conditions guaranteeing their correctness

Notes on Theory of Distributed Systems

Notes for the Yale course CPSC 465/565 Theory of Distributed Systems

Asynchronous neighborhood task synchronization

Faults are likely to occur in distributed systems. The motivation for designing self-stabilizing system is to be able to automatically recover from a faulty state. As per Dijkstra\u27s definition, a system is self-stabilizing if it converges to a desired state from an arbitrary state in a finite number of steps. The paradigm of self-stabilization is considered to be the most unified approach to designing fault-tolerant systems. Any type of faults, e.g., transient, process crashes and restart, link failures and recoveries, and byzantine faults, can be handled by a self-stabilizing system; Many applications in distributed systems involve multiple phases. Solving these applications require some degree of synchronization of phases. In this thesis research, we introduce a new problem, called asynchronous neighborhood task synchronization ( NTS ). In this problem, processes execute infinite instances of tasks, where a task consists of a set of steps. There are several requirements for this problem. Simultaneous execution of steps by the neighbors is allowed only if the steps are different. Every neighborhood is synchronized in the sense that all neighboring processes execute the same instance of a task. Although the NTS problem is applicable in nonfaulty environments, it is more challenging to solve this problem considering various types of faults. In this research, we will present a self-stabilizing solution to the NTS problem. The proposed solution is space optimal, fault containing, fully localized, and fully distributed. One of the most desirable properties of our algorithm is that it works under any (including unfair) daemon. We will discuss various applications of the NTS problem