Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

EFS: Efficient and Fault-Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems Against Faulty Clients

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2014)

  • 1251 Accesses

Abstract

Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols enhance system safety and availability in asynchronous networks, despite the arbitrary faults at both servers and clients. A practical BFT system should be efficient in both contention-free and contending cases, and fault scalable (i.e., efficiently tolerating the increasing number of server faults). However, few existing BFT systems completely satisfy this robustness requirement of efficiency. In this paper, we propose EFS, the first BFT solution that provides good efficiency and fault-scalability, in various cases (i.e. faulty or not, contending or not). EFS is a hybrid BFT system consisting of an efficient and fault scalable quorum protocol for the contention-free case and a fast agreement protocol to resolve contention in a fault-scalable manner. More importantly, its server-directed mode switch does not rely on digital signature nor introduce any extra communication overhead. This lightweight switch counters the vulnerability in the existing hybrid BFT systems, where faulty clients can simply send contending requests to degrade the performance significantly. The experiment results on the EFS prototype demonstrate robust fault tolerance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In: 3rd USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pp. 173–186 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Abd-El-Malek, M., Ganger, G., Goodson, G., Reiter, M., Wylie, J.: Fault-scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant services. In: 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pp. 59–74 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cowling, J., Myers, D., Liskov, B., et al.: HQ replication: a hybrid quorum protocol for Byzantine fault tolerance. In: 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pp. 177–190 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kotla, R., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M., Clement, A., Wong, E.: Zyzzyva: speculative Byzantine fault tolerance. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. (TOCS) 27(4), 7 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Hendricks, J., Sinnamohideen, S., Ganger, G., Reiter, M.: Zzyzx: scalable fault tolerance through Byzantine locking. In: 40th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 363–372 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Guerraoui, R., Knezevic, N., et al.: The next 700 BFT protocols. In: 5th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), pp. 363–376 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Commun. ACM 21(7), 558–565 (1978)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Schneider, F.: Implementing fault-tolerant services using the state machine approach: a tutorial. ACM Comput. Surv. 22(4), 299–319 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Clement, A., Wong, E., Alvisi, L., et al.: Making Byzantine fault tolerant systems tolerate Byzantine faults. In: 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), pp. 153–168 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Adya, A., Bolosky, W., et al.: Farsite: federated, available and reliable storage for an incompletely trusted environment. In: 5th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pp. 1–15 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Rhea, S., Eaton, P., Geels, D., Weatherspoon, H., Zhao, B., Kubiatowicz, J.: Pond: the OceanStore prototype. In: 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), pp. 1–14 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Reiter, M.: Secure agreement protocols: reliable and atomic group multicast in rampart. In: 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pp. 68–80 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Malkhi, D., Reiter, M.: A high-throughput secure reliable multicast protocol. In: 9th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, pp. 9–17 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Martin, J.-P., Alvisi, L.: Fast Byzantine consensus. IEEE Trans. Dependable Secure Comput. 3, 202–215 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Pease, M., Shostak, R., Lamport, L.: Reaching agreement in the presence of faults. J. ACM 27(2), 228–234 (1980)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Lamport, L.: The part-time parliament. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 16(2), 133–169 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Gafni, E., Lamport, L.: Disk Paxos. In: Herlihy, M.P. (ed.) DISC 2000. LNCS, vol. 1914, pp. 330–344. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Kihlstrom, K., Moser, L., Melliar-Smith, P.: The SecureRing protocols for securing group communication. In: 31st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), vol. 3, pp. 317–326 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Reiter, M.: A secure group membership protocol. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 22(1), 31–42 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Amir, Y., Coan, B., Kirsch, J., Lane, J.: Byzantine replication under attack. In: 38th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 197–206 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kotla, R., Dahlin, M.: High throughput Byzantine fault tolerance. In: 34th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 575–584 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Yin, J., Martin, J.-P., Venkataramani, A., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M.: Separating agreement from execution for Byzantine fault tolerant services. In: 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pp. 253–267 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Q. Cai, J. Lin and Q. Wang were partially supported by National 973 Program of China under award No. 2014CB 340603. F. Li was supported by NSF under Award No. EPS0903806 and matching support from the State of Kansas through the Kansas Board of Regents.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Quanwei Cai, Jingqiang Lin & Qiongxiao Wang

  2. Data Assurance and Communication Security Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Quanwei Cai, Jingqiang Lin & Qiongxiao Wang

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Quanwei Cai & Daren Zha

  4. The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Fengjun Li

Authors
  1. Quanwei Cai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jingqiang Lin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Fengjun Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Qiongxiao Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Daren Zha
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jingqiang Lin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CAS, Institute of Information Engineering CAS, Beijing, China

    Jing Tian

  2. Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, Beijing, China

    Jiwu Jing

  3. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, New York, USA

    Mudhakar Srivatsa

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

About this paper

Cite this paper

Cai, Q., Lin, J., Li, F., Wang, Q., Zha, D. (2015). EFS: Efficient and Fault-Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems Against Faulty Clients. In: Tian, J., Jing, J., Srivatsa, M. (eds) International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 152. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_22

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_22

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23828-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23829-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation