Secure Intrusion-tolerant Replication on the Internet

This paper describes a Secure INtrusion-Tolerant Replication Architecture1 (SINTRA) for coordination in asynchronous networks subject to Byzantine faults. SINTRA supplies a number of group communication primitives, such as binary and multi-valued Byzantine agreement, reliable and consistent broadcast, and an atomic broadcast channel. Atomic broadcast immediately provides secure state-machine replication. The protocols are designed for an asynchronous wide-area network, such as the Internet, where messages may be delayed indefinitely, the servers do not have access to a common clock, and up to one third of the servers may fail in potentially malicious ways. Security is achieved through the use of threshold public-key cryptography, in particular through a cryptographic common coin based on the Diffie-Hellman problem that underlies the randomized protocols in SINTRA. The implementation of SINTRA in Java is described and timing measurements are given for a test-bed of servers distribute...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: DSN
• Authors: Christian Cachin, Jonathan A. Poritz
• Keywords: Atomic Broadcast, Computer Networks, DSN 2002, Public-Key Cryptography, Wide-area Networks