Highly-Resilient Services for Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Modern society depends on several critical infrastructures like power, water, oil and gas generation and distribution. These infrastructures have evolved to become largely controlled by computers and interconnected by computer networks, which lets them exposed to the same types of threats as Internet systems. Therefore, research about mechanisms to improve the protection of these infrastructures is extremely important. Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) replication algorithms tackle this problem by allowing critical services, like storage and processing of monitoring data, to continue to operate correctly even if some of their components are compromised by malicious attackers. This paper proposes a novel BFT algorithm that requires fewer replicas, fewer communication steps and analytically seems to have better throughput and latency than others in literature. The main idea is to provide an efficient BFT algorithm suitable to WANs, to be applied in the construction of highly-resilient services for critical infrastructures, tolerating even the physical destruction of some servers.