DISC 2002: Distributed Computing pp 311-325 | Cite as

Minimal Byzantine Storage

  • Jean-Philippe Martin
  • Lorenzo Alvisi
  • Michael Dahlin
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 2508)

Abstract

Byzantine fault-tolerant storage systems can provide high availability in hazardous environments, but the redundant servers they require increase software development and hardware costs. In order to minimize the number of servers required to implement fault-tolerant storage services, we develop a new algorithm that uses a “Listeners” pattern of network communication to detect and resolve ordering ambiguities created by concurrent accesses to the system. Our protocol requires 3f + 1 servers to tolerate up to f Byzantine faults—f fewer than the 4f + 1 required by existing protocols for non-self-verifying data. In addition, SBQ-L provides atomic consistency semantics, which is stronger than the regular or pseudo-atomic semantics provided by these existing protocols. We show that this protocol is optimal in the number of servers— any protocol that provides safe semantics or stronger requires at least 3f + 1 servers to tolerate f Byzantine faults in an asynchronous system. Finally, we examine a non-confirmable writes variation of the SBQ-L protocol where a client cannot determine when its writes complete. We show that SBQ-L with non-confirmable writes provides regular semantics with 2f + 1 servers and that this number of servers is minimal.

Keywords

Shared Memory Read Operation Read Request Quorum System Additional Message 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jean-Philippe Martin
    • 1
  • Lorenzo Alvisi
    • 1
  • Michael Dahlin
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Texas at AustinAustin

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