Lightweight Failure Detection in Secure Group Communication

The secure and efficient detection of process failures is an essential requirement of many distributed systems. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a mechanism used for the detection of member failures in secure groups. Based on one-time passwords, our solution does not obviate the need for periodic statements from group members, but significantly reduces the cost of their generation and validation. A study comparing the costs of traditional mechanisms with our proposed approach is presented. Results of the study indicate the average case performance of the proposed scheme is of traditional failure detection in trusted groups, and negligible in the untrusted groups. A discussion of security and performance tradeoffs made through mechanism policy is provided.