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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2021.7
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-157825
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2022/15782/
Bano, Shehar ;
Sonnino, Alberto ;
Chursin, Andrey ;
Perelman, Dmitri ;
Li, Zekun ;
Ching, Avery ;
Malkhi, Dahlia
Twins: BFT Systems Made Robust
Abstract
This paper presents Twins, an automated unit test generator of Byzantine attacks. Twins implements three types of Byzantine behaviors: (i) leader equivocation, (ii) double voting, and (iii) losing internal state such as forgetting "locks" guarding voted values. To emulate interesting attacks by a Byzantine node, it instantiates twin copies of the node instead of one, giving both twins the same identities and network credentials. To the rest of the system, the twins appear indistinguishable from a single node behaving in a "questionable" manner. Twins can systematically generate Byzantine attack scenarios at scale, execute them in a controlled manner, and examine their behavior. Twins scenarios iterate over protocol rounds and vary the communication patterns among nodes. Twins runs in a production setting within DiemBFT where it can execute 44M Twins-generated scenarios daily. Whereas the system at hand did not manifest errors, subtle safety bugs that were deliberately injected for the purpose of validating the implementation of Twins itself were exposed within minutes. Twins can prevent developers from regressing correctness when updating the codebase, introducing new features, or performing routine maintenance tasks. Twins only requires a thin wrapper over DiemBFT, we thus envision other systems using it. Building on this idea, one new attack and several known attacks against other BFT protocols were materialized as Twins scenarios. In all cases, the target protocols break within fewer than a dozen protocol rounds, hence it is realistic for the Twins approach to expose the problems.
BibTeX - Entry
@InProceedings{bano_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2021.7,
author = {Bano, Shehar and Sonnino, Alberto and Chursin, Andrey and Perelman, Dmitri and Li, Zekun and Ching, Avery and Malkhi, Dahlia},
title = {{Twins: BFT Systems Made Robust}},
booktitle = {25th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2021)},
pages = {7:1--7:29},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-219-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2022},
volume = {217},
editor = {Bramas, Quentin and Gramoli, Vincent and Milani, Alessia},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/15782},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-157825},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2021.7},
annote = {Keywords: Distributed Systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Real-World Deployment}
}
