Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2006

Byzantine Fault-Tolerance and Beyond

Speaker: Jean-Philippe Martin

Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin

Host: Jay Aslam

Date: Thursday, April 27, 2006

Talk: 12:00 pm, 110 WVH

Abstract

Computer systems should be trustworthy in the sense that they should reliably answer requests from legitimate users and protect confidential information from unauthorized users. Building this kind of systems is challenging, even more so in the increasingly common case where control is split between multiple administrative domains.

Byzantine fault tolerance techniques can elegantly provide reliability without overly increasing the complexity of the system and have recently earned the attention of the system community. In the first part of his talk JP discusses some contributions toward practical Byzantine fault tolerance---in particular, how to reduce the cost of replication and how to reconcile replication with confidentiality. In the second part of the talk, JP argues that Byzantine fault-tolerance alone is not sufficient to deal with cooperative services under multiple administrative domain, where nodes may deviate from their specification not just because they are broken or compromised, but also because they are selfish. To address this challenge, JP proposes BAR, a new failure model that combines concepts from Byzantine fault-tolerance and Game Theory. JP will describe BAR, present an architecture for building BAR services, and briefly discuss BAR-B, a BAR-tolerant cooperative backup system.