Attestation Turns Crash Tolerance into Byzantine Tolerance

An attestation protocol enables one node in a distributed system to detect nodes that are Byzantine due to a malicious intrusion. Using attestation, distributed algorithms that tolerate channel crash failures can be transformed into ones that also tolerate Byzantine failures. The idea is to provide a network interface that requires a successful attestation before permitting messages from a remote nodes to be received. Thus, channels to Byzantine nodes are made to appear crashed. Erlang modules to support filtering and attestation have been written, including a partial Trusted Platform Module (TPM) interface.