Performance of an Intrusion-Tolerant Gossip Protocol

K.P. Kihlstrom and R.S. Elliott (USA)

Keywords

Distributed computing, fault-tolerant systems, secu rity and reliability, gossip protocol, scalability, group communication

Abstract

Gossip-based communication protocols have a number of desirable properties, including scalability and resilience to crash faults. However, very little work has been done in developing gossip protocols that are intrusion-tolerant, i.e., that are able to provide useful services even while the system is under attack or has been compromised. We present implementation details and performance results for StarblabIT, an intrusion-tolerant gossip-based group communication system. Our system combines the scalability and resilience of a gossip protocol along with the ability to provide useful services even during and after the system has been compromised or damaged due to an accident or in trusion. Performance results for our system indicate that the latency is scalable to large systems and that the throughput is quite high for an intrusion-tolerant system.

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