Abstract
Fault-tolerant algorithms for distributed systems with arbitrary failures are simpler to develop and prove correct if messages can be authenticated. However, using digital signatures for message authentication usually incurs substantial overhead in communication and computation. To exploit the simplicity provided by authentication without this overhead, we present a broadcast primitive that provides properties of authenticated broadcasts. This gives a methodology for deriving non-authenticated algorithms. Starting with an authenticated algorithm, we replace signed communication with the broadcast primitive to obtain an equivalent non-authenticated algorithm. We have applied this approach to various problems and in each case obtained simpler and more efficient solutions than those previously known.
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T.K. Srikanth He received the B. Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1981. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University, in 1985 and 1986, respectively. He is currently a research scientist at XOX Corporation, Ithaca, New York. His research interests include distributed computing, fault-tolerance, and geometric modeling.
Sam Toueg He received the B.Sc. Degree in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1976, and the M.S.E., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Princeton University, in 1977, 1978, and 1979, respectively. He spent a post-doctoral year at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, at Yorktown Heights, in the Systems Analysis and Algorithms division. In 1981 he joined the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His current research interests include distributed computing, faulttolerance, computer networks, and distributed database systems. Dr. Toueg is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGACT and SIGCOMM.
Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation under grant MCS 83-03135
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Srikanth, T.K., Toueg, S. Simulating authenticated broadcasts to derive simple fault-tolerant algorithms. Distrib Comput 2, 80–94 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01667080
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01667080