Chapter 16. Sabotage-proof Routing

When people think of a network component failing, they generally assume that it fails in a fail-stop manner—that is, it reverts instantaneously from working properly to stopping completely. But a different sort of failure can and does occur, in which a node continues operating but functions incorrectly. This can result from software bugs, hardware faults, or even sabotage. For example, a router might lie in its routing messages, misroute packets, reset the hop count, corrupt the data, perform perfectly except consistently trash packets from one source, or flood the network with garbage.

This sort of fault is known as a Byzantine failure. In this chapter, I sketch how a network can be designed to be resilient ...

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