Hardened Paxos Through Consistency Validation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to enhance Paxos, a distributed consensus algorithm, by incorporating consistency validation techniques to detect and tolerate arbitrary faults, thereby improving reliability in distributed systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to harden Paxos against arbitrary faults using consistency validation, which was not previously explored in this context.

Findings

Consistency validation effectively detects non-malicious arbitrary faults.

Hardened Paxos maintains high availability despite arbitrary faults.

Experimental results demonstrate improved fault tolerance.

Abstract

Due to the emergent adoption of distributed systems when building applications, demand for reliability and availability has increased. These properties can be achieved through replication techniques using middleware algorithms that must be capable of tolerating faults. Certain faults such as arbitrary faults, however, may be more difficult to tolerate, resulting in more complex and resource intensive algorithms that end up being not so practical to use. We propose and experiment with the use of consistency validation techniques to harden a benign fault-tolerant Paxos, thus being able to detect and tolerate non-malicious arbitrary faults.