BAR Tolerance for Cooperative Services

J. Martin and A. Aiyer and L. Alvisi and A. Clement and M. Dahlin and C. Porth

Abstract

This paper describes a general approach to constructing cooperative services that span multiple administrative domains. In such environments, protocols must tolerate both rational behaviors when nodes arbitrarily deviate from the protocol for their local benefit and Byzantine behaviors when a broken, misconfigured, or malicious node arbitrarily deviates from the protocol for any other reason. The paper examines this problem in the context of a cooperative backup system and makes three contributions. First, it introduces the BAR (Byzantine, Altruistic, Rational) model, which provides the foundation for reasoning about the properties of this class of services. Second, it presents a general three-tier architecture aimed at reducing the complexity of building services developed in the BAR model. Our realization of this architecture includes an asynchronous replicated state machine that provides the normal safety and liveness guarantees as long as at most than (n-2)/3 nodes are Byzantine; the rest of the nodes can be rational. The paper's third contribution is to describe an implementation of PIB, the first cooperative backup service to tolerate both Byzantine users and an unbounded number of rational users. We show that, under the BAR model, PIB provides provable safety and liveness guarantees. We also show that our approach is practical: our prototype of a BART state machine executes 20 requests per second and our PIB prototype can back up a gigabyte of data in 20 minutes.