Ali Shoker

Citation:

Shoker A, Yabandeh M, Guerraoui R, Bahsoun JP.  2012.  Obfuscated BFT. :1-15.

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Abstract:

A major assumption underlies the correctness of BFT services: failure independence. However, state of the art protocols rely on inter-replica communication in order to preserve consistency, and they implicitly require replicas to store access information about each other. This jeopardizes the independence of failure assumption since intruders can sneak from one replica to another and compromises the entire service. In this paper, we leverage this issue by exploring the idea of obfuscation in the BFT context: the replicas of a BFT service are completely unaware of each others identities. We present a new client-based replication BFT protocol, called OBFT, that assumes honest, but possibly crash-prone clients. The protocol imposes equivalent load on replicas to avoid bottlenecks, and reduces the load on the primary replica by distributing multi-cast and cryptographic tasks among clients. We evaluate OBFT on an Emulab cluster with a wide area topology and convey its scalability with respect to state of the art BFT protocols.

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