The SecureRing group communication system

Abstract

Secure reliable group communication protocols can facilitate the development of survivable distributed systems that are able to remain correct and reliable despite intrusions that cause some nodes to behave in an arbitrary or malicious manner. However, the development of such protocols is itself difficult, and prior systems have exhibited high overheads, primarily due to the cost of digital signatures. The SecureRing group communication system provides secure, reliable, totally-ordered message delivery and group membership services despite the malicious corruption of a constant fraction of the processors within the system. The network is assumed not to partition, and persistent communication faults are handled as processor faults. The SecureRing message delivery protocol makes use of message digests in a signed token to allow a single digital signature to cover multiple messages, and to avoid the need for multiple rounds of message exchange in normal operation. While these techniques mean that messages are not authenticated in real time, they enable the SecureRing protocols to achieve high throughput and reasonable latency.