2025/11/06 by Silvia Bonomi, Bonomi, Silvia, Giovanni Farina +7
Computer Science · #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Petri Nets in System Modeling #Software System Performance and Reliability #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.04523
openalex publication_date 2025/11/06 · openalex created_date 2025/11/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Modern distributed systems face growing security threats, as attackers continuously enhance their skills and vulnerabilities span across the entire system stack, from hardware to the application layer. In the system design phase, fault tolerance techniques can be employed to safeguard systems. From a theoretical perspective, an attacker attempting to compromise a system can be abstracted by considering the presence of Byzantine processes in the system. Although this approach enhances the resilience of the distributed system, it introduces certain limitations regarding the accuracy of the model in reflecting real-world scenarios. In this paper, we consider a self-protecting distributed system based on the Monitoring-Analyse-Plan-Execute over a shared Knowledge (MAPE-K) architecture, and we propose a new probabilistic Mobile Byzantine Failure (MBF) that can be plugged into the Analysis component. Our new model captures the dynamics of evolving attacks and can be used to drive the self-protection and reconfiguration strategy. We analyze mathematically the time that it takes until the number of Byzantine nodes crosses given thresholds, or for the system to self-recover back into a safe state, depending on the rates of Byzantine infection spreading vs. the rate of self-recovery. We also provide simulation results that illustrate the behavior of the system under such assumptions.