The Prime Replication System




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    Prime: Byzantine Replication Under Attack

Overview

Prime is a Byzantine fault-tolerant replication system whose goal is to provide a meaningful level of performance even after some of the replication servers have been compromised. Like previous Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocols, Prime meets Safety (consistency of the correct replicas) and Liveness (the eventual execution of each update) as long as no more than f out of 3f+1 replicas are compromised and the network is sufficiently stable. Unlike previous protocols, Prime is also designed to meet a stronger performance guarantee, which we call Bounded-Delay. Bounded-Delay limits the amount of performance degradation that can be caused by malicious servers. Intuitively, Prime forces any leader that remains in power to meet a threshold level of performance, where the threshold is a function of the message delays between the correct servers in the system, which cannot be arbitrarily increased by the malicious servers.

Contributors

Prime was created at Johns Hopkins University by Yair Amir, Jonathan Kirsch, and John Lane.

Special thanks to Brian Coan for major contributions to the design of the Prime algorithm.

Funding

Our work on Prime was partially funded by Grants 0430271 and 0716620 from the National Science Foundation.

Software

A version of Prime suitable for evaluating the performance of the protocol in both fault-free and under-attack executions will soon be released. The code was written in C and runs on Linux.

License

Prime may be freely used and distributed under some conditions. Please review the license agreement for more details.

Download

Source code can be downloaded here.

Related Publications

  • Byzantine Replication Under Attack
        Yair Amir, Brian Coan, Jonathan Kirsch, John Lane
        38th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2008), Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008, pp. 197-206.
     

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