Travel and Registration Support for Third Bertinoro Workshop on Future of Distributed Computing

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Distributed systems are increasingly deployed over Multiple Administrative Domains (MADs) in which no single authority controls all participating nodes. Traditionally, nodes in distributed systems deviate from their specification because they are broken (e.g., because of bugs, hardware failures, configuration errors, or even malicious attacks). MAD systems add a new dimension: without a central administrator ensuring that each unbroken node follows the assigned protocol, nodes may deviate to selfishly maximize their utility. Byzantine Fault Tolerance handles broken nodes well. However, the Byzantine model classifies all deviations as faults and requires a bound on the number of faults that is impossible to establish when nodes can be selfish. Conversely, traditional game-theoretic models handle selfish nodes well, but are vulnerable to arbitrary disruptions if even one broken node behaves irrationally. The goal of the FuDiCo III international workshop, held from June 4th to June 7th 2007, is to identify the conceptual and practical foundations on which to build dependable MAD distributed systems. The workshop, the third in the prestigious Future of Distributed Computing (FuDiCo) series, brings together leading senior researchers and promising graduate students from different areas (security, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, networking, and economics) for a ?multicultural? approach to this challenging and multi-faceted problem. The objective is to produce a series of written reports (targeted for SIGACT and SIGOPS News) that provide a snapshot of the current research in the area and identify promising avenues for future research.