Towards Auditable Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized, auditable monitoring framework for distributed systems to verify correctness, detect faults, and establish mutual trust among parties, demonstrated on an air vehicle booking system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed logic-based monitoring approach that enhances trust and auditability in heterogeneous distributed systems.

Findings

Framework enables verification of system correctness and fault detection.

Application demonstrates increased trust among system participants.

Supports claims for compensation through auditable evidence.

Abstract

The emerging trend towards distributed (cloud) systems (DS) has widely arrived whether in the automotive, public or the financial sector, but the execution of services of heterogeneous service providers is exposed to several risks. Beside hardware/software faults or cyber attacks that can influence the correctness of the system, fraud is also an issue. In such case it is not only important to verify the correctness of the system, but also have evidence which component and participant behaves faulty. This makes it possible, e.g. to claim for compensation after systems execution but also to assure information for verification can be trusted. The main goal of our research is to assure the monitoring of DS based on auditable information. We follow a decentralized monitoring strategy and envision a distributed monitoring approach of system properties based on distributedlogic programs that consider auditability. The expected contribution of this work is to establish with the application of our framework the mutual trust of distributed parties, as well as trust of clients in the systems execution. We showcase our ideas on a DS for booking services with unmanned air vehicles.