A secure group membership protocol

Author

Reiter, Michael K.

Author_Institution

AT&T Bell Labs., Murray Hill, NJ, USA

Volume

22

Issue

1

fYear

1996

fDate

1/1/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

31

Lastpage

42

Abstract

A group membership protocol enables processes in a distributed system to agree on a group of processes that are currently operational. Membership protocols are a core component of many distributed systems and have proved to be fundamental for maintaining availability and consistency in distributed applications. We present a membership protocol for asynchronous distributed systems that tolerates the malicious corruption of group members. Our protocol ensures that correct members control and consistently observe changes to the group membership, provided that in each instance of the group membership, fewer than one-third of the members are corrupted or fail benignly. The protocol has many potential applications in secure systems and, in particular, is a central component of a toolkit for constructing secure and fault-tolerant distributed services that we have implemented

Keywords

distributed processing; protocols; security of data; software fault tolerance; software tools; asynchronous distributed systems; availability; consistency; currently operational processes; distributed system processes; fault-tolerant distributed service construction; group members; group membership change control; group membership change observation; malicious corruption tolerance; secure distributed service construction; secure group membership protocol; secure systems; toolkit; Communication system security; Cryptographic protocols; Cryptography; Electronic switching systems; Fault tolerant systems; Information security; Intrusion detection; Maintenance engineering; Marine vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.481515

Filename

481515