Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems
This course presents methods for building dependable and secure
distributed systems. The emphasis is on replication as the means to
tolerate faults. Topics include group communication, failure
detectors, reliable broadcast protocols, distributed cryptography,
threshold cryptosystems, Byzantine agreement, quorum systems, and
more. Applications to cluster computing, highly available systems
(e.g., Amazon's Dynamo), Internet services (e.g., DNS), and storage
systems (e.g., IBM's GPFS) will be presented.
The course presents principles and fundamental methods, and shows how
they are applied to real-world systems.
Lecturer. Dr.
Christian Cachin,
IBM Zurich Research Lab.
Teaching Assistant. Matus Harvan,
Information Security group, ETH Zürich.
Dates.
| Attention: Time has shifted! |
| Lecture: |
Thursday, 15:15-17:00, RZ F21, starting 19. Feb. 2009. |
| Exercise: |
Thursday, 17:15-18:00, RZ F21, starting 19. Feb. 2009. |
Web page. http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~cca/sft09/,
The course is part of the
Information Security Master Track.
Prerequisites. Knowledge in information
security and/or network security, distributed systems, and cryptography.
- Introduction
- Dependability Concepts
- Quorums
- Shared Memory
- Consensus and Broadcast
- Group Communication and High Availability
- Distributed Cryptography
- Byzantine Agreement
- Service Replication
- Data Storage
Literature references are contained in the lecture notes. This list
contains only additional material.
- [Schwartz] John Schwartz.
Who needs hackers?
The New York Times, 12 September 2007.
- [GPFS] Frank Schmuck and
Roger Haskin.
GPFS: A shared-disk file system for large computing clusters.
In Proc. USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST
2002), 2002.
- [Dynamo]
Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz
Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex
Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, and Werner Vogels.
Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store.
In Proc. 21st ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles
(SOSP), pages 205-220, 2007.
- [DNS] Christian Cachin and Asad Samar.
Secure
distributed DNS.
In Proc. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
(DSN-2004), pages 423-432, June 2004.
- [Cryptography for Storage 1] Christian Cachin.
Cryptographic methods for protecting storage systems.
Tutorial, presented at 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
(FAST '08), 2008.
- [Cryptography for Storage 2] Vishal Kher
and Yongdae Kim. Securing
distributed storage: Challenges, techniques, and systems. In
Proc. Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability
(StorageSS), 2005.
- [Distributed Storage] Gregory Chockler, Rachid
Guerraoui, Idit Keidar, and Marko Vukolic.
Reliable distributed storage.
IEEE Computer, 42(4):60-67, April 2009.
(Library copy is here.)
Last updated Wednesday, 02-Sep-2009 10:30:48 CEST,
by Christian Cachin.
