REFIT

Resource-Efficient Fault and Intrusion Tolerance

(Third Party Funds Single)

Project leader: Tobias Distler
Project members: Tobias Distler, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Michael Eischer, Laura Lawniczak, Christopher Eibel, Klaus Stengel
Start date: 1. October 2009
End date: 31. October 2024
Acronym: REFIT
Funding source: DFG-Einzelförderung / Sachbeihilfe (EIN-SBH)
URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Research/REFIT/

Abstract:

Internet-based services play a central role in today's society. With such services progressively taking over from traditional infrastructures, their complexity steadily increases. On the downside, this leads to more and more faults occurring. As improving software-engineering techniques alone will not do the job, systems have to be prepared to tolerate faults and intrusions.

REFIT investigates how systems can provide fault and intrusion tolerance in a resource-efficient manner. The key technology to achieve this goal is virtualization, as it enables multiple service instances to run in isolation on the same physical host. Server consolidation through virtualization not only saves resources in comparison to traditional replication, but also opens up new possibilities to apply optimizations (e.g., deterministic multi-threading).

Resource efficiency and performance of the REFIT prototype are evaluated using a web-based multi-tier architecture, and the results are compared to non-replicated and traditionally-replicated scenarios. Furthermore, REFIT develops an infrastructure that supports the practical integration and operation of fault and intrusion-tolerant services; for example, in the context of cloud computing.

Publications:

• Lawniczak L., Distler T.:
  Stream-based State Machine Replication
  In: Proceedings of the 17th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '21) 2021
  DOI: 10.1109/edcc53658.2021.00024
  URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.13019
• Eischer M., Distler T.:
  Resilient Cloud-based Replication with Low Latency
  21st International Middleware Conference, Middleware 2020 (, 7. December 2020 - 11. December 2020)
  In: Middleware 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 21st International Middleware Conference 2020
  DOI: 10.1145/3423211.3425689
  URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Publications/2020/eischer_20_middleware.pdf
• Eischer M., Straßner B., Distler T.:
  Low-Latency Geo-Replicated State Machines with Guaranteed Writes
  7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2020 (Heraklion, 27. April 2020 - 27. April 2020)
  In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2020 2020
  DOI: 10.1145/3380787.3393686
  URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Publications/2020/eischer_20_papoc.pdf
• Eischer M., Büttner M., Distler T.:
  Deterministic Fuzzy Checkpoints
  International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS '19) (Lyon, 1. October 2019 - 4. October 2019)
  In: Proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS '19) 2019
  DOI: 10.1109/SRDS47363.2019.00026
  URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Publications/2019/eischer_19_srds.pdf
• Deyerl C., Distler T.:
  In Search of a Scalable Raft-based Replication Architecture
  6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2019 (Dresden, 25. March 2019)
  In: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2019 2019
  DOI: 10.1145/3301419.3323968