BASE: Using Abstraction to Improve Fault Tolerance

ing Abstraction to Improve Fault Tolerance MIGUEL CASTRO Microsoft Research and RODRIGO RODRIGUES and BARBARA LISKOV MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Software errors are a major cause of outages and they are increasingly exploited in malicious attacks. Byzantine fault tolerance allows replicated systems to mask some software errors but it is e to deploy. This paper describes a replication technique, BASE, which uses abstraction to reduce the cost of Byzantine fault tolerance and to improve its ability to mask software errors. BASE reduces cost because it enables reuse of off-the-shelf service implementations. It improves availbecause each replica can be repaired periodically using an abstract view of the state stored by correct replicas, and because each replica can run distinct or nondeterministic service implementations, which reduces the probability of common mode failures. We built an NFS service where each replica can run a different off-the-shelf file system implementation, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Rodrigo Rodrigues, Miguel Castro, Barbara Liskov
• Keywords: Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Fault Tolerance MIGUEL, Nondeterministic Service Implementations, Operating System, SOSP 2001