From:                     Kendra Smith

Sent:                      Thursday, February 17, 2000 1:44 AM

To:                         M?crosöft Research Tech Talk, Sem. Notice

Cc:                         Kendra Smith

Subject:                 UW-CSE Colloq / 4-6-2000 / Castro / MIT / Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

UW-CSE Colloq / 4-6-2000 / Castro / MIT / Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

 

*NOTE* This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See

http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.

 

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Seattle, Washington 98195

 

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Box 352350

(206) 543-1695

 

COLLOQUIUM

 

SPEAKER:      Miguel Castro, MIT

 

TITLE:          Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

 

DATE:           Thursday, April 6, 2000

 

TIME:           3:30 pm

 

PLACE:                   134 Sieg Hall

 

HOST:           Hank Levy

 

ABSTRACT:

 

The growing reliance of our society on computers demands that we provide

systems with improved reliability, availability, and security. This talk

describes BFT -- a new software Byzantine fault tolerance toolkit that

addresses these issues.

 

BFT can be used to build replicated systems that work correctly and remain

available even when some of their replicas behave arbitrarily due to

malicious attacks, software errors, or hardware failures. Whereas previous

Byzantine-fault-tolerant replication techniques relied on unrealistic

assumptions or were too slow to be used in practice, BFT can be used to

build practical systems: it works in asynchronous environments like the

Internet; it uses bounded storage; and it incorporates several important

optimizations that improve the response time over previous techniques by

more than an order of magnitude. BFT is also the first to recover

Byzantine-faulty replicas proactively. As a result, it can tolerate any

number of faults over the lifetime of the system provided less than 1/3 of

the replicas become faulty within a small window of vulnerability.

 

This talk describes the algorithms used by BFT and the implementation of

BFT and BFS -- a Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS service built using BFT. The

talk also presents results from a performance evaluation of BFT and

BFS. Preliminary results show that BFS is only 3% slower than a standard

unreplicated NFS when running the Andrew benchmark.

 

Refreshments to follow.

 

Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu

Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu