Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Web Services for n-Tier and Service Oriented Architectures

Abstract

Mission-critical services must be replicated to guarantee correctness and high availability in spite of arbitrary (Byzantine) faults. Traditional Byzantine fault tolerance protocols suffer from several major limitations. Some protocols do not support interoperability between replicated services. Other protocols provide poor fault isolation between services leading to cascading failures across organizational and application boundaries. Moreover, traditional protocols are unsuitable for applications with tiered architectures, long-running threads of computation, or asynchronous interaction between services. We present Perpetual, a protocol that supports Byzantine fault-tolerant execution of replicated services while enforcing strict fault isolation. Perpetual enables interaction between replicated services that may invoke and process remote requests asynchronously in long-running threads of computation. We present a modular implementation, an Axis2 Web Services extension, and experimental results that demonstrate only a moderate overhead due to replication.