Moving Participants Turtle Consensus

TL;DR

This paper introduces Moving Participants Turtle Consensus (MPTC), an asynchronous, crash and Byzantine-tolerant consensus protocol employing moving target defenses and cryptography to withstand DoS attacks and enable dynamic reconfiguration.

Contribution

It presents a novel consensus protocol that supports on-the-fly reconfiguration and uses cryptography to enhance security against DoS attacks in distributed systems.

Findings

MPTC maintains high performance under DoS attacks.

Reconfiguration enhances system resilience.

Implementation demonstrates effectiveness in attack scenarios.

Abstract

We present Moving Participants Turtle Consensus (MPTC), an asynchronous consensus protocol for crash and Byzantine-tolerant distributed systems. MPTC uses various moving target defense strategies to tolerate certain Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks issued by an adversary capable of compromising a bounded portion of the system. MPTC supports on the fly reconfiguration of the consensus strategy as well as of the processes executing this strategy when solving the problem of agreement. It uses existing cryptographic techniques to ensure that reconfiguration takes place in an unpredictable fashion thus eliminating the adversary's advantage on predicting protocol and execution-specific information that can be used against the protocol. We implement MPTC as well as a State Machine Replication protocol and evaluate our design under different attack scenarios. Our evaluation shows that MPTC approximates best case scenario performance even under a well-coordinated DoS attack.