Reliably Executing Tasks in the Presence of Untrusted Entities

In this work we consider a distributed system formed by a master processor and a collection of n processors (workers) that can execute tasks; worker processors are untrusted and might act maliciously. The master assigns tasks to workers to be executed. Each task returns a binary value, and we want the master to accept only correct values with high probability. Furthermore, we assume that the service provided by the workers is not free; for each task that a worker is assigned, the master is charged with a work-unit. Therefore, considering a single task assigned to several workers, our goal is to have the master computer to accept the correct value of the task with high probability, with the smallest possible amount of work (number of workers the master assigns the task). We explore two ways of bounding the number of faulty processors: (a) we consider a fixed bound f < n/2 on the maximum number of workers that may fail, and (b) a probability p < 1/2 of any processor to be faulty ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SRDS
• Authors: Antonio Fernández, Luis López, Agustín Santos, Chryssis Georgiou
• Keywords: Correct Value, Master Assigns Tasks, SRDS 2006, Worker Processors