A Component-Based Methodology to Design Arbitrary Failure Detectors for Distributed Protocols

Abstract

Nowadays, there are many protocols able to cope with process crashes, but, unfortunately, a process crash represents only a particular faulty behavior. Handling tougher failures (e.g. sending omission failures, receive omission failures, arbitrary failures) is a real practical challenge due to malicious attacks or unexpected software errors. This paper proposes a component-based methodology allowing to take a protocol A resilient to crash failures and to add software components, namely liveness and safety failure detectors, in order to adapt the protocol A to be resilient to more general failures than crashes, without changing the code of A. Then, the feasibility of this approach is shown, by providing an implementation of liveness failure detectors and of safety failure detectors for a protocol solving the problem of global data computation