Steward: Scaling Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication to Wide Area Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 80 - 93
• Main Authors: Amir, Y., Danilov, C., Dolev, D., Kirsch, J., Lane, J., Nita-Rotaru, C., Olsen, J., Zage, D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington IEEE 01.01.2010; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Agreements; Algorithms; Architecture; Communication; Communication standards; Computer science; Delay; Digital Object Identifier; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Hardware; Messages; Network topologies; Protocol; Protocols; Public key; Queries; Replication; Safety; scalability; Semantics; Software; Students; Studies; Wide area networks; Fault-tolerance; Distributed systems; wide-area networks; scalability
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2008.53

This paper presents the first hierarchical byzantine fault-tolerant replication architecture suitable to systems that span multiple wide-area sites. The architecture confines the effects of any malicious replica to its local site, reduces message complexity of wide-area communication, and allows read-only queries to be performed locally within a site for the price of additional standard hardware. We present proofs that our algorithm provides safety and liveness properties. A prototype implementation is evaluated over several network topologies and is compared with a flat byzantine fault-tolerant approach. The experimental results show considerable improvement over flat byzantine replication algorithms, bringing the performance of byzantine replication closer to existing benign fault-tolerant replication techniques over wide area networks.