Designing Secure and Reliable Applications using Fragmentation-Redundancy-Scattering: An Object-Oriented Approach

Security and reliability issues in distributed systems have been investigated for several years at LAAS using a technique called Fragmentation-Redundancy-Scattering (FRS). The aim of FRS is to tolerate both accidental and intentional faults: the core idea consists in fragmenting confidential information in order to produce insignificant fragments and then in scattering the fragments so obtained in a redundant fashion across a distributed system, such as a large network of workstations and servers. Of these workstations, in principle just the user's own workstation needs to be regarded as trusted, whereas from this user's viewpoint the other workstations and servers, which in all probability are under someone else's control, can be untrusted devices. This paper describes an object-oriented approach to the use of FRS, now under development at LAAS and Newcastle. This approach greatly eases the task of application programmers who seek to ensure reliable secure processing, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: EDCC
• Authors: Jean-Charles Fabre, Yves Deswarte, Brian Randell
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Confidential Information, Distributed System, EDCC 1994, Workstations