DATE: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 Note Special Day 
     TIME: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Note Special Time 
     PLACE: CIC 2101 
 SPEAKER: 
    Lorenzo Alvisi 
      University of Texas, Austin  
TITLE: 
    BAR Fault Tolerance for Cooperative Services 
ABSTRACT:
    This talk describes a general approach to constructing cooperative
    services that span multiple administrative domains. In such 
    environments,
    protocols must tolerate both Byzantine behaviors when
    broken, misconfigured, or malicious nodes arbitrarily deviate from
    their specification and rational behaviors when selfish nodes deviate
    from their specification to increase their local benefit. 
We will first introduce the BAR (Byzantine, Altruistic, Rational) model as a foundation for reasoning about cooperative services. We will then proposes a general three-level architecture to reduce the complexity of building services under the BAR model. Finally, we will describe an implementation of BAR-B, the first cooperative backup service to tolerate both Byzantine users and an unbounded number of rational users. At the core of BAR-B is an asynchronous replicated state machine that provides the customary safety and liveness guarantees despite nodes exhibiting both Byzantine and rational behaviors. Our prototype provides acceptable performance for our application: our BAR-tolerant state machine executes 15 requests per second, and our BAR-B backup service can back up 100MB of data in under 4 minutes.
BIO:
    Lorenzo Alvisi is an Associate Professor and Faculty Fellow in the 
    Department of
    Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and an Alfred P.
    Sloan Research Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. (1996) and M.S. (1994) in
    Computer Science from Cornell University, and a Laurea summa cum laude
    in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. He is interested in
    distributed systems, dependability, and red Italian motorcycles. 
SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
    Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/ 
