Fireflies

Abstract

This paper describes and evaluates Fireflies, a scalable protocol for supporting intrusion-tolerant network overlays. While such a protocol cannot distinguish Byzantine nodes from correct nodes in general, Fireflies provides correct nodes with a reasonably current view of which nodes are live, as well as a pseudo-random mesh for communication. The amount of data sent by correct nodes grows linearly with the aggregate rate of failures and recoveries, even if provoked by Byzantine nodes. The set of correct nodes form a connected submesh; correct nodes cannot be eclipsed by Byzantine nodes. Fireflies is deployed and evaluated on PlanetLab.