Secure Failure Detection in TrustedPals

This paper presents a modular redesign of TrustedPals, a smartcard-based security framework for solving secure multiparty computation (SMC). TrustedPals allows to reduce SMC to the problem of fault-tolerant consensus between smartcards. Within the redesign we investigate the problem of solving consensus in a general omission failure model augmented with failure detectors. To this end, we give novel definitions of both consensus and the class of P failure detectors in the omission model and show how to implement P and have consensus in such a system with some weak synchrony assumptions. The integration of failure detection into the TrustedPals framework uses tools from privacy enhancing techniques such as message padding and dummy traffic.