Often distributed systems are considered robust if one of the components halts. But a failure mode that is often neglected is when a component continues to operate, but incorrectly. This can happen due to malicious intentional compromise, or simple hardware faults, misconfiguration, or bugs. Unfortunately, there is no single add-on to designs that will fix this case. This talk presents three very different systems and how they each handle resilience despite malicious participants. The problems, and the solutions, are very different. The important message of this talk is that there is no one solution, and that this case must be considered in designs.
Radia Perlman is a Fellow at EMC. She has made many contributions to the fields of network routing and security protocols including robust and scalable network routing, spanning tree bridging, storage systems with assured delete, and distributed computation resilient to malicious participants. She wrote the textbook Interconnections , and cowrote the textbook Network Security. She holds over 100 issued patents. She has received numerous awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM's SIGCOMM and Usenix, election to National Academy of Engineering, induction into the Internet Hall of Fame, and induction into the Inventor Hall of Fame. She has a PhD from MIT.