Applying fault-tolerance principles to security research

Abstract

There has been much focus on building secure distributed systems. The CERIAS center has been established at Purdue along with 14 other such centers in USA. We note that many of the ideas, concepts, algorithms being proposed in security have many common threads with reliability. We need to apply the science and engineering of reliability research to the research in security and vice versa. We briefly give some examples to illustrate the ideas. To increase reliability in distributed systems, the use of quorums allows the transactions to read and write replicas even if some replicas have failed or are unavailable. So the systems manage the replicas so that a forum can be formed in the presence of failures. To make systems secure against unauthorized access, one can use the reverse strategy of making it difficult to form quorums. All accesses require permission from a group of authorities who could coordinate to deny a yes majority vote.