Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems (2013)

Description

The course has two main parts. In the first part, the emphasis is on replication as the means to tolerate faults. Applications to cluster computing and cloud computing services will be presented. In the second part, the goal is to protect clients from powerful but untrusted, remote storage and computation providers. The course presents principles and fundamental methods, and shows how they are applied to real-world systems.

Organization

Dates.

Lecture:	Friday, 13:15-15:00, ML F 34.
Exercise:	Friday, 15:15-16:00, ML F 34.

Web page. http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~cca/sft13/,

The course is part of the Information Security Master Track.

Prerequisites. Knowledge in information security and/or network security, cryptology, and distributed systems. In particular, this course uses concepts from public-key cryptology (RSA, Diffie-Hellman) and reliability in asynchronous message-passing systems. Corresponding to ETHZ D-INFK courses "Information Security" and "Verteilte Systeme" ("Distributed Systems") or equivalent.

Topics (tentative)

1. Dependability
2. Reliable broadcast
3. Distributed storage
4. Consensus
5. System examples
6. Distributed cryptography and proactive recovery
7. Integrity and confidentiality for data stored by untrusted servers
8. Confidentiality for computation on untrusted servers

Schedule

Date		Lecture notes	Assigned exercise
22. Feb.		(1) Introduction and (2) Dependability	Exercise 1
1. March		RAID-6 (EVENODD); Primitives (communication, failure detectors, cryptography) [CGR11] 1; 2.1, 2.2, 2.4.1, 2.4.4, 2.5	Exercise 2
8. March		Failure detectors; (2) Reliable broadcast, FIFO broadcast, causal broadcast [CGR11] 2.6.1, 2.6.2; 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 (excl. 3.3.2), 3.9 (3.9.1-3.9.4)	Exercise 3
15. March		(2ff.) Quorums; Causal and Byzantine broadcasts [CGR11] 2.7.3; 3.9.7, 3.10 (excl. 3.10.4), 3.11	Exercise 4
22. March		(3) Distributed storage, semantics and implementations [CGR11] 4.1, 4.2, 4.3.1, 4.3.4, 4.4.1-4.4.2	Exercise 5
12. April		(3ff.) Byzantine distributed storage; (4) Consensus and atomic broadcast [CGR11] 4.7.1-4.7.2; 5.1.1, 5.2.1, 5.2.2, 6.1	Exercise 6
19. April		(4ff.) Atomic broadcast, leader election, and fail-noisy uniform consensus (Paxos) [CGR11] 6.1, 4.7.1-4.7.2; 5.1.1, 5.2.1, 5.2.2	Exercise 7
26. April		(6) Distributed cryptography and proactive recovery Handout sections 6.1-6.3	Exercise 8
3. May		(6ff.) RSA threshold signatures and proactive cryptosystems (handout, 6.4-6.6); Non-blocking atomic commit ([CGR11] 6.6)	Exercise 9
10. May		(7) Cryptography for storage systems (printer-friendly format) For background concepts, see [WHKMV08].	No exercise
17. May		(8) Oblivious transfer and secure computation [S08] Chapter 24:3; Chapter 26:1-2. Alternative formulation in [LP09] Section 1.	Exercise 10
24. May		(8ff.) More on two-party secure computation, CBMC-based garbled circuit evaluation [HFKV12]; Fully homomorphic encryption; Interaction is needed in secure computation [ACCK01] Sec. 1-2;	Exercise 11
31. May		(8ff.) Commitments [S08] Chapter 24:2; Fairness and fair exchange; (5ff.) Windows Azure Storage [CWO11].	No exercise

Literature

• Background on distributed systems
  • [AW04] Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics. Wiley, second edition, 2004.

  • [TVS07] Andrew Tanenbaum and Maarten Van Steen. Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2nd edition, 2007.

  • [CDK05] George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg. Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design. Addison-Wesley, 4th edition, 2005.

  • [CPS10] Bernadette Charron-Bost, Fernando Pedone, and André Schiper, editors. Replication: Theory and Practice, volume 5959 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2010.

• Cryptography references
  • [PP10] Christof Paar and Jan Pelzl. Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners. Springer, 2009.

  • [S08] Nigel Smart. Cryptography: An Introduction. 3rd edition, available online, 2008.

• Background on practical storage systems
  • [WHKMV08] John Wilkes, Christopher Hoover, Beth Keer, Pankaj Mehra, and Alistair Veitch. Storage, Data, and Information Systems. HP Laboratories, 2008.

• Secure computation references
  • [ACCK01] J. Algesheimer, C. Cachin, J. Camenisch, and G. Karjoth. Cryptographic security for mobile code, Proc. 22th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, 2-11, 2001.

  • [LP09] Yehuda Lindell and Benny Pinkas. A proof of security of Yao's protocol for two-party computation, Journal of Cryptology, 22:161-188, 2009.

  • [HFKV12] Andreas Holzer, Martin Franz, Stefan Katzenbeisser, and Helmut Veith. Secure Two-Party Computations in ANSI C, Proc. 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2012.

• Systems
  • [HKJR10] Patrick Hunt, Mahadev Konar, Flavio P. Junqueira, and Benjamin Reed. ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for internet-scale systems. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2010.

  • [JRS11] Flavio Junqueira, Benjamin Reed, and Marco Serafini. Zab: High-performance broadcast for primary-backup systems. In Proc. 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2011.

  • [CWO11] Brad Calder, Ju Wang, Aaron Ogus, Niranjan Nilakantan, Arild Skjolsvold, Sam McKelvie, et al. Windows Azure Storage: A highly available cloud storage service with strong consistency. In Proc. 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2011.

Assessment