Distributed Voting for Security and Fault Tolerance

Faults present risk to the success to an aerospace mission, so they will continually be a concern of the fault tolerance community. In this report, we take up the issue of security in conjunction with fault tolerance. This motivated us to devise new approaches to distributed voting. Within a LAN (and some cases a WAN) we replace the almost ubiquitous 2-phase commit protocol with one that is light-weight and improves both performance and security without losing any of the traditional fault coverage. Accompanying this algorithin is one that we propose for resolving correct-but-possibly-not-identical votes within a WAN. Both of these algorithms are used to uniquely enhance the integrity of distributed information systems-- protecting them from faults and hostile attacks.Air Force Research Lab Rome NY Information Directorate is the author of 'Distributed Voting for Security and Fault Tolerance', published 2001 under ISBN 9781423529866 and ISBN 1423529863.