The Impact of Topology on Byzantine Containment in Stabilization

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenges of combining self-stabilization and Byzantine fault tolerance in distributed systems, demonstrating impossibility results and proposing an optimal topology-aware containment protocol for maximum metric trees.

Contribution

It introduces a weaker containment scheme called topology-aware strict stabilization and provides an optimal protocol for maximum metric trees under this scheme.

Findings

Impossibility of strict stabilization for maximum metric tree construction with Byzantine nodes

Proposal of topology-aware strict stabilization as a feasible alternative

An optimal protocol for maximum metric trees within the new containment scheme

Abstract

Self-stabilization is an versatile approach to fault-tolerance since it permits a distributed system to recover from any transient fault that arbitrarily corrupts the contents of all memories in the system. Byzantine tolerance is an attractive feature of distributed system that permits to cope with arbitrary malicious behaviors. We consider the well known problem of constructing a maximum metric tree in this context. Combining these two properties prove difficult: we demonstrate that it is impossible to contain the impact of Byzantine nodes in a self-stabilizing context for maximum metric tree construction (strict stabilization). We propose a weaker containment scheme called topology-aware strict stabilization, and present a protocol for computing maximum metric trees that is optimal for this scheme with respect to impossibility result.