Title: Giuliana Teixeira dos Santos Veronese
 13rd ALßAN Conference 
Proposta de Tese para a Prova de Qualificação 
Intrusion-Tolerant Replication for Large-Scale 
Networks 
Giuliana Teixeira dos Santos Veronese Advisors 
Miguel Pupo Correia Lau Cheuk Lung 
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa 
 2Intrusion Tolerance
- The complexity of current computer systems have 
 been causing an immense number of
 vulnerabilities.
- The number of cyber-attacks has been growing 
 making computer security as a whole an important
 research challenge
- Intrusion tolerance (IT) has been proposed as a 
 new paradigm for computer system security
- The idea is apply the fault tolerance paradigm in 
 domain of system security
- Malicious faults can never be entirely prevented 
3Intrusion Tolerance
-  Replicas can not share the same vulnerabilities, 
 otherwise causing intrusions in all the replicas
 would be almost the same as in a single one.
-  Replicas should have a different 
 hardware/software and to be deployed in different
 sites across a wide-area network
Clients
Servers
 Interconnected by a network Communicate by 
message-passing Byzantine Fault Tolerant 
algorithms  
 4Byzantine Fault Tolerance (3f1)
- Enables a system to continue operating properly 
 in the event of the accidental or malicious
 faults of some of its components.
Clients
Servers
Primary 
 5Problems
- A majority of the servers must be non-faulty to 
 do voting on the output of the servers. However
 in general n  3f 1.
- Additional servers involves additional costs in 
 hardware, software and administration
- Large-scale systems are complex, reducing 
 replicas means reduce the system complexity
- BFT algorithms perform very well on LANs but 
 their message complexity limits their ability to
 scale on WANs
6Solution Byzantine Fault Tolerance (2f1) 
Servers
- Trusted service 
-  Never assigns the same identifier to two 
 different messages
- Replicas are forced to execute to a single 
 sequence of operations.
- Unique identifier is externally verifiable
Trusted Service Monotonic counter 1,2,3,4...  
 7PBFT x MinBFT
 prepare
pre- prepare
request
commit
reply
request
prepare
commit
reply
Client
Replica 0
Replica 1
Replica 2
Replica 3
(a) PBFT
(b) MinBFT 
 M. Castro and B. Liskov. Practical Byzantine 
Fault Tolerance OSDI99 
 8Problem
- A faulty primary can degrade the performance of 
 the system to a fraction of what the environment
 allows
Servers
Clients
New Primary
Primary
View-Change 
 9Solution Spinning Algorithm
- Changes the primary whenever it defines the order 
 of a request, avoiding the performance
 degradation attack
Servers
Clients
Primary
Primary
Primary
Primary 
 10Performance Evaluation
Latency (ms)
Throughput op/sec 
 11Contribution
- Algorithms are simple and deal with the main 
 limitations of current BFT algorithms in WANs.
-  MinBFT 
-  MinZyzyva 
-  Spinning 
- Algorithms are minimal in terms of number of 
 replicas, complexity and number of communication
 steps
- These algorithms have better throughput than 
 Castro and Liskovs PBFT, and better latency in
 networks with non-negligible communication delays
reduce the number of replicas and communication 
steps.
mitigates the performance degradation attacks 
and improves the latency and throughput. 
 12Publications
Spin Ones Wheels? Byzantine Fault Tolerance with 
a Spinning Primary Giuliana Veronese, Miguel 
Correia, Alyson Bessani, Lau Lung 28th 
International Symposium on Reliable Distributed 
Systems (2009) Intrusion Tolerant Active 
Replication for Large Scale Networks Giuliana 
Veronese 39th Dependable Systems and Networks  
student forum (2009) From Crash to Byzantine 
Consensus with 2f  1 Processes Giuliana 
Veronese, Miguel Correia, Lau Lung 39th 
Dependable Systems and Networks (2009) Minimal 
Byzantine Fault Tolerance Giuliana Veronese, 
Miguel Correia, Alyson Bessani, Lau Lung, Paulo 
Veríssimo IEEE Transactions on Computers 
(submitted)  
 133rd ALßAN Conference 
Proposta de Tese para a Prova de Qualificação 
Intrusion-Tolerant Replication for Large-Scale 
Networks 
Giuliana Teixeira dos Santos Veronese Supervisors
 Miguel Pupo Correia Lau Cheuk 
Lung Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de 
Lisboa