Distributed Systems

Introduction

Out of the many possible definitions of a distributed system, we herein employ the following, which is perhaps the most general (and in particular supercedes Lamport's humorous remark that "a distributed system is the one that prevents you from working because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of"):

Distributed System

A distributed system is comprised by a set of distributed (i.e., not located in the same spot) components (hardware and/or software) working together to provide one service.

That is, there are two characteristics to a distributed system: (1) the service it provides emerges at the system level and (2) components must communicate over links (which are components themselves). The first implies that parts of the system, although they might be usable stand-alone, are not what we mean by the term -- a cell-phone's games or calendar functions are not distributed, but the service "communicate by voice independently of location" is. The second narrows down the range: programs on the same host and communicating over IPC are not considered distributed. Likewise, both points affect security of such a system. Consistent with (1), in a distributed setting new security problems arise, which are not limited to (2), that communication is potentially dangerous.

There are at least two main reasons for distribution: The service may require it (e.g. credit card systems have to be available in many locations) or availability considerations may make it necessary to remove single points of failure by replicating components. In combination with the characteristics mentioned above, these result in several topical areas for security. First, distributing a system's components strengthens the importance of trust relations between components and of the system as a whole regarding its interactions with the environment. Consequently, we will focus on trust in the first section of the following text. Service requirements are the second field we will take a look at; here, our main aim will be outlining the implications of concurrency. Thirdly, we will briefly consider the interplay of fault tolerance and security and explore how -- and if at all -- security of distributed systems can benefit from fault tolerance research, which will lead us to the concept of intrusion tolerance.

Fault Tolerance

As lined out in the introduction, one main reason for deploying a system in a distributed manner is a particular, task-specific demand on the service it provides. Obviously, such a demand also leads to certain requirements regarding the service's availability, e.g., the mobile-phone system is of little use if it does not work.

Insights from Dependability

Dependability research has obtained a few insights into the complexities of these problems as well as into the effectiveness of possible solutions. Its most basic model is the famous "Fault-Error-Failure" sequence of how computer systems (of any kind) end up at a failure state, i.e., not conforming to specified system or service behaviour:

A fault -- some minor inconsistency with the specification, introduced by the operator or the designer -- in a component is triggered and leads to an error -- a state where a part of the component does not conform to its specified behaviour --, which, if untreated, eventually results in the failure of the component. For example, a single bit in a memory module may permanently stay at value 1 under certain environment conditions. When a program uses the module's value as part of an address and this address happens to be outside the program's memory range, the program could be killed by the OS and thus the program may fail to provide its service.

The chain just described can be broken at several points: First, fault and error prevention measures can be applied to stop the introduction of faults and their resulting in errors, both by design as well as by operation. Second, one can seek to remove faults after identifying them. However, common experience says that neither can be fully effective, and thus there will always be faults. Taking this into account, one has to tolerate said faults -- i.e. find ways to prevent them from causing failures:

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Distributed systems allow parts of the system to be located on separate computers and different locations. So business logic and data can be reached from any remote computer (location).

Distributed objects are the most recent development in distributed computing. Distributed object technologies such as Java RMI, CORBA, and DCOM allow objects running on one machine to be used by applications on different computers.

There was a question in the seminar regarding the splitting of secret keys. Read about one possibility at Secret Sharing.