PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To solve the problem, wherein it is impossible for an electronic content information provider to provide commercially secure and effective method, for a configurable general-purpose electronic commercial transaction/distribution control system. SOLUTION: In this system, having at least one protected processing environment for safely controlling at least one portion of decoding of digital information, a secure content distribution method comprises a process for encapsulating digital information in one or more digital containers; a process for encrypting at least a portion of digital information; a process for associating at least partially secure control information for managing interactions with encrypted digital information and/or digital container; a process for delivering one or more digital containers to a digital information user; and a process for using a protected processing environment, for safely controlling at least a portion of the decoding of the digital information. COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a423264.pdf

Systems and Methods for Secure Transaction Management and Electronic Rights Protection

The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf

Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process

In Distributed Algorithms, Nancy Lynch provides a blueprint for designing, implementing, and analyzing distributed algorithms. She directs her book at a wide audience, including students, programmers, system designers, and researchers.



Distributed Algorithms contains the most significant algorithms and impossibility results in the area, all in a simple automata-theoretic setting. The algorithms are proved correct, and their complexity is analyzed according to precisely defined complexity measures. The problems covered include resource allocation, communication, consensus among distributed processes, data consistency, deadlock detection, leader election, global snapshots, and many others.



The material is organized according to the system model-first by the timing model and then by the interprocess communication mechanism. The material on system models is isolated in separate chapters for easy reference.



The presentation is completely rigorous, yet is intuitive enough for immediate comprehension. This book familiarizes readers with important problems, algorithms, and impossibility results in the area: readers can then recognize the problems when they arise in practice, apply the algorithms to solve them, and use the impossibility results to determine whether problems are unsolvable. The book also provides readers with the basic mathematical tools for designing new algorithms and proving new impossibility results. In addition, it teaches readers how to reason carefully about distributed algorithms-to model them formally, devise precise specifications for their required behavior, prove their correctness, and evaluate their performance with realistic measures.


Table of Contents

1 Introduction 
2 Modelling I; Synchronous Network Model 
3 Leader Election in a Synchronous Ring 
4 Algorithms in General Synchronous Networks 
5 Distributed Consensus with Link Failures 
6 Distributed Consensus with Process Failures 
7 More Consensus Problems 
8 Modelling II: Asynchronous System Model 
9 Modelling III: Asynchronous Shared Memory Model 
10 Mutual Exclusion 
11 Resource Allocation 
12 Consensus 
13 Atomic Objects 
14 Modelling IV: Asynchronous Network Model 
15 Basic Asynchronous Network Algorithms 
16 Synchronizers 
17 Shared Memory versus Networks 
18 Logical Time 
19 Global Snapshots and Stable Properties 
20 Network Resource Allocation 
21 Asynchronous Networks with Process Failures 
22 Data Link Protocols 
23 Partially Synchronous System Models 
24 Mutual Exclusion with Partial Synchrony 
25 Consensus with Partial Synchrony

Distributed algorithms

As sensor networks edge closer towards wide-spread deployment, security issues become a central concern. So far, much research has focused on making sensor networks feasible and useful, and has not concentrated on security.We present a suite of security building blocks optimized for resource-constrained environments and wireless communication. SPINS has two secure building blocks: SNEP and mTESLA SNEP provides the following important baseline security primitives: Data confidentiality, two-party data authentication, and data freshness. A particularly hard problem is to provide efficient broadcast authentication, which is an important mechanism for sensor networks. mTESLA is a new protocol which provides authenticated broadcast for severely resource-constrained environments. We implemented the above protocols, and show that they are practical even on minimal hardware: the performance of the protocol suite easily matches the data rate of our network. Additionally, we demonstrate that the suite can be used for building higher level protocols.

http://www.csl.mtu.edu/cs5461/www/Reading/Perrig02.pdf

SPINS: security protocols for sensor networks

Authentication protocols are the basis of security in many distributed systems, and it is therefore essential to ensure that these protocols function correctly. Unfortunately, their design has been extremely error prone. Most of the protocols found in the literature contain redundancies or security flaws. A simple logic has allowed us to describe the beliefs of trustworthy parties involved in authentication protocols and the evolution of these beliefs as a consequence of communication. We have been able to explain a variety of authentication protocols formally, to discover subtleties and errors in them, and to suggest improvements. In this paper we present the logic and then give the results of our analysis of four published protocols, chosen either because of their practical importance or because they serve to illustrate our method.

A logic of authentication

Easy proofs are given, of the impossibility of solving several consensus problems (Byzantine agreement, weak agreement, Byzantine firing squad, approximate agreement and clock synchronization) in certain communication graphs. It is shown that, in the presence ofm faults, no solution to these problems exists for communication graphs with fewer than 3m+1 nodes or less than 2m+1 connectivity. While some of these results had previously been proved, the new proofs are much simpler, provide considerably more insight, apply to more general models of computation, and (particularly in the case of clock synchronization) significantly strengthen the results.

Easy Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Consensus Problems

: A set of mutants of a program P, M(P), is a finite subset of the set of all programs written in the language of P, and EM(P) is the set of programs in M(P) which are (functionally) equivalent to p. For a set of test data T, DM(P,T) is the set of programs in M(P) which give results differing from P on at least one point in T. As described elsewhere, it is possible to choose the function M so that ms (P,T) = 1 only if T demonstrates the correctness of P with high probability. This paper is a case study of four test data generation schemes. For a fixed program P, five sets of test data are generated and mutation scores are calculated using the FMS.2 mutation system. Since each set has a score less than one, the FMS.2 system is used to derive a set T such that ms(P,T)=1.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a101155.pdf

A Comparison of Some Reliable Test Data Generation Procedures.

Fairness in concurrent systems can be viewed as an abstraction that bridges low-level timing guarantees and make them available to programmers with a minimal loss of power and a maximal ease of use. We investigate the implementation and power of a range of fairness models that are appropriate to the synchronous, semi-synchronous and asynchronous contexts of various concurrent systems.

Fairness of Shared Objects

Work to date on algorithms for message-passing systems has explored a wide variety of types of faults, but corresponding work on shared memory systems has usually assumed that only crash faults are possible. In this work, we explore situations in which processes accessing shared objects can fail arbitrarily (Byzantine faults).

/pdf/objects-shared-by-byzantine-processes-55o0hjv1af.pdf

Objects Shared by Byzantine Processes

: In this paper examines some concurrency control algorithms for nested transaction systems. A simple local property called dynamic atomicity is defined for data objects in such a system, and we show that all the executions of a system are serially correct (despite concurrency and transaction aborts) provided each data object is dynamic atomic. This result is applied to give a correctness proof for a new algorithm, called Conflict Based Locking, for managing data in a nested transaction system. The algorithm uses a table specifying which operations may not proceed concurrently to determine when an operation may be granted a lock on an object. The algorithm is an extension of a general conflict-based locking protocol introduced by Weihl for transaction systems without nesting. It is also similar to Moss' algorithm, which uses read- and write- locks and a stack of versions of each object to ensure the serializability and recoverability of transactions accessing the data. We show that objects implemented using Moss' algorithm of the new Conflict-Based Locking algorithm are dynamic atomic. Thus it follows that if each object in a nested transaction system uses either Moss' algorithm or the new Conflict-Based Locking algorithm, then all executions of the system will be serially correct.

Michael Merritt

Papers

Easy Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Consensus Problems

A Comparison of Some Reliable Test Data Generation Procedures.

Fairness of Shared Objects

Objects Shared by Byzantine Processes

Nested Transactions, Conflict-Based Locking, and Dynamic Atomicity.