Cryptographic Support for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing

Abstract

In an open distributed system, agents comprising an application must not only survive (possibly malicious) failures of the hosts they visit, but they must also be resilient to the potentially hostile actions of other hosts. In particular, faulty hosts that are not visited by agents can confound a naive replica-management scheme by spoofing. Cryptographic protocols to solve this problem are summarized, as well as some experiments that show how replication can actually speed up some applications.