A Secure Checkpointing Protocol for Survivable Server Design

Secure checkpointing appears to be a useful technique for designing survivable systems. These are fault-tolerant systems that are robust against malicious security attacks. Secure checkpointing, however, is not easily done. Without adequate protection, the checkpointing process can be attacked and compromised. The checkpointing data can be subjected to malicious attacks and be a source of security breach. In this paper, we present a new secure checkpointing scheme that is robust against malicious attacks. Our approach uses strong cryptographic techniques for data confidentiality and integrity, Byzantine agreement protocols for compromised peer detection and information dispersal techniques for reliability and availability.