Distributed eventual leader election in the crash-recovery and general omission failure models.

102 p.Distributed applications are present in many aspects of everyday life. Banking, healthcare or transportation are examples of such applications. These applications are built on top of distributed systems. Roughly speaking, a distributed system is composed of a set of processes that collaborate among them to achieve a common goal. When building such systems, designers have to cope with several issues, such as different synchrony assumptions and failure occurrence. Distributed systems must ensure that the delivered service is trustworthy.Agreement problems compose a fundamental class of problems in distributed systems. All agreement problems follow the same pattern: all processes must agree on some common decision. Most of the agreement problems can be considered as a particular instance of the Consensus problem. Hence, they can be solved by reduction to consensus. However, a fundamental impossibility result, namely (FLP), states that in an asynchronous distributed system it is impossible to achieve consensus deterministically when at least one process may fail. A way to circumvent this obstacle is by using unreliable failure detectors. A failure detector allows to encapsulate synchrony assumptions of the system, providing (possibly incorrect) information about process failures. A particular failure detector, called Omega, has been shown to be the weakest failure detector for solving consensus with a majority of correct processes. Informally, Omega lies on providing an eventual leader election mechanism

TrustedPals plataformarako middlewarearen inplementazioa eta simulazioa

Sistema banatuak zenbait konputagailu edo gailu autonomoaz osaturiko sareak dira, non algoritmo banatuen bidez partaide guztien lana koordinatzen da entitate bakarra izatearen irudia emanez. Eredu honi esker sistemaren sendotasuna handitzen da, posible baita sistemak aurrera jarraitzea zenbait partaidek huts egin arren. Sistema banatuak diseinatzeak badu zenbait zailtasun, prozesu guztien arteko koordinazioa lortu behar baita. Erronka nagusietako bat adostasuna edo consensus lortzea da; hau da, prozesu guztiak ados jartzea zerbait erabaki behar dutenean. Ingurune desberdinetan planteatu badaiteke ere, lan honetan Byzantine ingurunean egingo da. Ingurune honetan partaideen hutsegiteak ausaz gerta daitezke eta edozein momentutan. Horrez gain, hutsegite horiek edozein motakoak izan daitezke, hala nola, prozesu bat bertan behera geratzea edota prozesu baten eskaera okerra edo lekuz kanpokoa egitea. Aurkeztutako consensus arazoa garrantzi handikoa da sistema banatuen arloan, honen bitartez beste hainbat helburu lortu baitaitezke. Horien artean Secure Multy-party Computation (SMC) dugu, non sare banatu bateko partaide guztiek adostasuna lotu behar dute partaide bakoitzaren informazioa gainontzekoei ezkutatuz. Horren adibide bezala “aberatsaren arazoa” azaldu ohi da, non partaide guztiek aurkitu behar dute zein den beraien artean aberatsena, partaide bakoitzak gainontzekoen “aberastasuna” ezagutu ahal izan gabe. SMC erabili daiteke soluzioa emateko planteamendu bera jarraitzen duten aplikazio erreal askori, hala nola, enkante pribatuak edo bozketak. SMC inplementatu ahal izateko TrustedPals izeneko plataforma dugu, non diseinu modularra jarraituz smartcard bat eta algoritmo banatuak konbinatzen dira lehenengo consensus eta ondoren SMC lortzeko. Karrera amaierako proiektu honen helburua TrustedPals proposamenaren alde praktikoa jorratzea izango da. Horretarako proposamenaren algoritmo banatuak inplementatu eta simulatuko dira zenbait probetako kasuetan. Simulazioak bideratzeko gertaera diskretuko NS-3 simulagailuan erabiliko da. Simulazio eszenario desberdinak inplementatuko dira eta ondoren emaitzak aztertuko dira

TrustedPals: Secure Multiparty Computation Implemented with Smart Cards

We study the problem of Secure Multi-party Computation (SMC) in a model where individual processes contain a tamper-proof security module, and introduce the TrustedPals framework, an efficient smart card based implementation of SMC for any number of participating entities in such a model. Security modules can be trusted by other processes and can establish secure channels between each other. However, their availability is restricted by their host, that is, a corrupted party can stop the computation of its own security module as well as drop any message sent by or to its security module. We show that in this model SMC can be implemented by reducing it to a fault-tolerance problem at the level of security modules. Since the critical part of the computation can be executed locally on the smart card, we can compute any function securely with a protocol complexity which is polynomial only in the number of processes (that is, the complexity does not depend on the function which is computed), in contrast to previous approaches

Security of Smartphones at the Dawn of their Ubiquitousness

The importance of researching in the field of smartphone security is substantiated in the increasing number of smartphones, which are expected to outnumber common computers in the future. Despite their increasing importance, it is unclear today if mobile malware will play the same role for mobile devices as for common computers today. Therefore, this thesis contributes to defining and structuring the field mobile device security with special concern on smartphones and on the operational side of security, i.e., with mobile malware as the main attacker model. Additionally, it wants to give an understanding of the shifting boundaries of the attack surface in this emerging research field. The first three chapters introduce and structure the research field with the main goal of showing what has to be defended against today. Besides introducing related work they structure mobile device attack vectors with regard to mobile malicious software and they structure the topic of mobile malicious software itself with regard to its portability. The technical contributions of this thesis are in Chapters 5 to 8, classified according to the location of the investigation (on the device, in the network, distributed in device and network). Located in the device is MobileSandbox, a software for dynamic malware analysis. As another device-centric contribution we investigate on the efforts that have to be taken to develop an autonomously spreading smartphone worm. The results of these investigations are used to show that device-centric parts are necessary for smartphone security. Additionally, we propose a novel device-centric security mechanism that aims at reducing the attack surface of mobile devices to mobile malware. The network-centric investigations show the possibilities that a mobile network operator can use in its own mobile network for protecting the mobile devices of its clients. We simulate the effectiveness of different security mechanisms. Finally, the distributed investigations show the feasibility of distributed computation algorithms with security modules. We give prototypic implementations of protocols for secure multiparty computation as a modularized version with failure detector and consensus algorithms, and for fair exchange with guardian angels

Transforming Asynchronous Systems with Crash-Stop Failures and Failure Detectors to the General Omission Model

This paper studies the impact of omission failures on asynchronous distributed s ystems with crash-stop failures. For the large group of problem specifications that are restricted to correct processes, we show how to transform a crash-stop related problem specification into an equivalent omission one. For that, we provide transformations for algorithms and failure detectors, such that if and only if an algorithm using a failure detector satisfies a problem specification, then the transformed algorithm using the transformed failure detector satisfies the transformed problem specification. Our transformed problem specification is ensured to be non-trivial, and moreover, the transformation reveals itself to be in a reasonable sense weakest failure detector preserving. Our results help to use the power of the well-understood crash-stop model to aut omatically derive solutions for the general omission model, which has recently raised interest for being noticeably applicable for security problems in distributed environments equipped with security modules such as smartcards

SodsBC: A Post-quantum by Design Asynchronous Blockchain Framework

We present a novel framework for asynchronous permissioned blockchain with high performance and post-quantum security for the first time. Specifically, our framework contains two asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT) protocols SodsBC and SodsBC++. We leverage concurrently preprocessing to accelerate the preparation of three cryptographic objects for the repeated consensus procedure, including common random coins as the needed randomness, secret shares of symmetric encryption keys for censorship resilience, and nested hash values for external validation predicates. All preprocessed objects utilize proved or commonly believed to be post-quantum cryptographic tools to resist an adversary equipped with quantum computation capabilities. The evaluation in AWS shows that SodsBC and SodsBC++ reduce the latency of two state-of-the-art but quantum-sensitive competitors Honeybadger and Dumbo by $53\%$ and $6\%$, respectively in the setting that the number of participants is $100$ and each block part has $20,000$ transactions

Contributions on agreement in dynamic distributed systems

139 p.This Ph.D. thesis studies the agreement problem in dynamic distributed systems by integrating both the classical fault-tolerance perspective and the more recent formalism based on evolving graphs. First, we developed a common framework that allows to analyze and compare models of dynamic distributed systems for eventual leader election. The framework extends a previous proposal by Baldoni et al. by including new dimensions and levels of dynamicity. Also, we extend the Time-Varying Graph (TVG) formalism by introducing the necessary timeliness assumptions and the minimal conditions to solve agreement problems. We provide a hierarchy of time-bounded, TVG-based, connectivity classes with increasingly stronger assumptions and specify an implementation of Terminating Reliable Broadcast for each class. Then we define an Omega failure detector, W, for the eventual leader election in dynamic distributed systems, together with a system model, , which is compatible with the timebounded TVG classes. We implement an algorithm that satisfy the properties of W in M. According to our common framework, M results to be weaker than the previous proposed dynamic distributed system models for eventual leader election. Additionally we use simulations to illustrate this fact and show that our leader election algorithm tolerates more general (i.e., dynamic) behaviors, and hence it is of application in a wider range of practical scenarios at the cost of a moderate overhead on stabilization times

Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large amount of sensor nodes, small low-cost wireless computing devices equipped with different sensors. Sensor networks collect and process environmental data and can be used for habitat monitoring, precision agriculture, wildfire detection, structural health monitoring and many other applications. Securing sensor networks calls for novel solutions, especially because of their unattended deployment and strong resource limitations. Moreover, developing security solutions without knowing precisely against what threats the system should be protected is impossible. Thus, the first task in securing sensor networks is to define a realistic adversary model. We systematically investigate vulnerabilities in sensor networks, specifically focusing on physical attacks on sensor node hardware. These are all attacks that require direct physical access to the sensor nodes. Most severe attacks of this kind are also known as node capture, or node compromise. Based on the vulnerability analysis, we present a novel general adversary model for sensor networks. If the data collected within a sensor network is valuable or should be kept confidential then the data should be protected from unauthorized access. We determine security issues in the context of access control in sensor networks in presence of node capture attacks and develop protocols for broadcast authentication that constitute the core of our solutions for access control. We develop broadcast authentication protocols for the case where the adversary can capture up to some threshold t sensor nodes. The developed protocols offer absolute protection while not more than t nodes are captured, but their security breaks completely otherwise. Moreover, security in this case comes at a high cost, as the resource requirements for the protocols grow rapidly with t. One of the most popular ways to overcome impossibility or inefficiency of solutions in distributed systems is to make the protocol goals probabilistic. We therefore develop efficient probabilistic protocols for broadcast authentication. Security of these protocols degrades gracefully with the increasing number of captured nodes. We conclude that the perfect threshold security is less appropriate for sensor networks than the probabilistic approach. Gracefully degrading security offers better scalability and saves resources, and should be considered as a promising security paradigm for sensor networks

Keeping Fairness Alive : Design and formal verification of optimistic fair exchange protocols

Fokkink, W.J. [Promotor]Pol, J.C. van de [Promotor