SITAN
Full Title
SITAN - Services for Intrusion Tolerant Ad Hoc NetworksDescription
The project will create a toolbox of distributed services that can be employed in the construction of wireless ad hoc applications, simplifying their design and development, and automatically assuring tolerance to both accidental faults and attacks. To fulfill this objective, it will be necessary to investigate new distributed protocols and models, which are able to capture the inherent characteristics of the environment, and explore them to enhance the performance and resilience of the system. For example, the wireless networks provide a natural broadcasting medium, where the cost of transmitting a message to multiple nodes can be just the same of sending it to a single node, as long as they are within communication range. To take advantage of this feature, it becomes necessary to depart from the common modeling assumption employed in intrusion-tolerant systems, where channels are reliable and point-to-point, and assume broadcast communication with dynamic omissions failures. Unfortunately, these new modeling assumptions are bound by strict impossibility results, which prevent basic distributed primitives such as weak forms of consensus, and therefore, we will need to find ways to circumvent them to make our solutions practical.