A Middleware for Constructing Highly Available, Fault Tolerant, and Attack Tolerant Services

This paper describes the design of a middleware that provides support for constructing highly available, secure, fault-tolerant, and attack-tolerant services. The central component of this middleware is a group communication service that comprises of six network protocols: atomic broadcast, group membership, failure detection, attack detection, group access control, and secure intermember communication protocols. The paper describes the motivation behind each of these protocols and discusses their functionalities.