Byzantine Fault Tolerant Authentication

A Byzantine fault tolerant public key infrastructure is presented. It aims to fulfill the authentication requirements of large distributed systems consisting of semi-trusted parties. The distributed trust model does not demand the existence of predefined trusted parties and provides authentication if more than a threshold of the participants are honest. A voting based protocol implements distributed trust and supports dynamic membership without fail safe multi-cast or synchrony. This paper describes the system design and discusses its applicability to mobile networks and peer-to-peer systems on the Internet. It also demonstrates the Byzantine fault tolerance of distributed authentication.Technical report DCS-TR-49