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Spotlight on Radia Perlman ...
Routing with Byzantine Robustness October 18, 2005- A Byzantine failure is one in which a node, rather than simply halting, continues to operate, but no longer follows the rules. This might happen because of hardware errors or compromise of the software. A traditional network requires the cooperation of all the routers in order to ensure paths are computed properly, and packets are forwarded in a fair and nondisciminatory way. This report describes how to design a network that will continue operating properly even if some of the routers have been compromised and are exhibiting arbitrarily malicious behavior. The design in this paper guarantees that two honest nodes will be able to communicate, with some fair share of network resources, provided that at least one functional path connects the two nodes. Furthermore, the design works in a large, hierarchical network, in such a way that no router needs to keep state larger than necessary to support its piece of the hierarchy. This design has importance for security, but also has implications for enforcing fair use of resources per flow despite the fact that core routers will not have resources to keep track of per-flow state. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
