Distributed Protocols and Heterogeneous Trust: Technical Report
Isaac C. Sheff, Robbert van Renesse, Andrew C. Myers

TL;DR
This paper develops distributed protocols that operate effectively in environments with heterogeneous trust by using lattice-based information flow analysis, generalizing existing algorithms, and demonstrating performance benefits through simulations.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach using lattice-based information flow to design distributed protocols for heterogeneous trust environments, extending existing algorithms.
Findings
Protocols can be adapted for heterogeneous trust environments.
Customizing protocols improves performance over homogeneous trust assumptions.
Lattice-based analysis ensures protocol correctness in complex trust settings.
Abstract
The robustness of distributed systems is usually phrased in terms of the number of failures of certain types that they can withstand. However, these failure models are too crude to describe the different kinds of trust and expectations of participants in the modern world of complex, integrated systems extending across different owners, networks, and administrative domains. Modern systems often exist in an environment of heterogeneous trust, in which different participants may have different opinions about the trustworthiness of other nodes, and a single participant may consider other nodes to differ in their trustworthiness. We explore how to construct distributed protocols that meet the requirements of all participants, even in heterogeneous trust environments. The key to our approach is using lattice-based information flow to analyse and prove protocol properties. To demonstrate this…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Security and Verification in Computing · Access Control and Trust
