Building Robust Distributed Systems and Network Protocols by Using Adversarial Testing and Behavioral Analysis

Abstract

We describe our experience over the past five years with building more robust distributed systems and network protocols by using adversarial testing and behavioral analysis. We describe the benefits and disadvantages of both approaches and the design of the tools we have built (Turret, Turret-W, SNAKE, and Chiron). We discuss how we applied them to byzantine-resilient state machine replication, wireless routing protocols, transport protocols, TLS, and IoT implementation of application-level protocols.