Nysiad: Practical Protocol Transformation to Tolerate Byzantine Failures

The paper presents and evaluates Nysiad,1 a system that implements a new technique for transforming a scalable distributed system or network protocol tolerant only of crash failures into one that tolerates arbitrary failures, including such failures as freeloading and malicious attacks. The technique assigns to each host a certain number of guard hosts, optionally chosen from the available collection of hosts, and assumes that no more than a configurable number of guards of a host are faulty. Nysiad then enforces that a host either follows the system’s protocol and handles all its inputs fairly, or ceases to produce output messages altogether—a behavior that the system tolerates. We have applied Nysiad to a link-based routing protocol and an overlay multicast protocol, and present measurements of running the resulting protocols on a simulated network.