BFT-WS: A Byzantine Fault Tolerance Framework for Web Services

Many Web services are expected to run with high degree of security and dependability. To achieve this goal, it is essential to use a Web-services compatible framework that tolerates not only crash faults, but Byzantine faults as well, due to the untrusted communication environment in which the Web services operate. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of such a framework, called BFT-WS. BFT-WS is designed to operate on top of the standard SOAP messaging framework for maximum interoperability. It is implemented as a pluggable module within the Axis2 architecture, as such, it requires minimum changes to the Web applications. The core fault tolerance mechanisms used in BFT-WS are based on the well-known Castro and Liskov's BFT algorithm for optimal efficiency. Our performance measurements confirm that BFT-WS incurs only moderate runtime overhead considering the complexity of the mechanisms.

[1]  Michael Luck,et al.  Transparent Fault Tolerance for Web Services Based Architectures , 2002, Euro-Par.

[2]  Miguel Oom Temudo de Castro,et al.  Practical Byzantine fault tolerance , 1999, OSDI '99.

[3]  Phillip Hallam-Baker,et al.  Web services security: soap message security , 2003 .

[4]  Abdelkarim Erradi,et al.  A broker-based approach for improving Web services reliability , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'05).

[5]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Pond: The OceanStore Prototype , 2003, FAST.

[6]  Deron Liang,et al.  Fault tolerant Web service , 2003, Tenth Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, 2003..

[7]  Sajeeva L. Pallemulle,et al.  BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANT EXECUTION OF LONG-RUNNING DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS , 2006 .

[8]  Louise E. Moser,et al.  Making Web services dependable , 2006, First International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES'06).

[9]  Michael R. Lyu,et al.  Making Services Fault Tolerant , 2006, ISAS.

[10]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  The Byzantine Generals Problem , 1982, TOPL.

[11]  Priya Narasimhan,et al.  Thema: Byzantine-fault-tolerant middleware for Web-service applications , 2005, 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'05).

[12]  Jacques Durand,et al.  Web Services Reliable Messaging TC WS-Reliability 1.1 , 2004 .

[13]  Jie Xu,et al.  Increasing Web Service Dependability Through Consensus Voting , 2005, 29th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'05).

[14]  Glen Dobson,et al.  Using WS-BPEL to Implement Software Fault Tolerance for Web Services , 2006, 32nd EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (EUROMICRO'06).

[15]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Adding high availability and autonomic behavior to Web services , 2004, Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[16]  Deron Liang,et al.  Fault tolerant Web Services , 2007, J. Syst. Archit..