Towards privacy-preserving fault detection

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the problem of detecting general faults in distributed systems that handle confidential information. Detecting non-crash faults is difficult in this setting because, to check the behavior of a given node, we need to know its expected behavior -- but that can depend on the confidential information. Classical zero-knowledge proofs are difficult to apply because they are designed to verify functions with a fixed number of inputs, but in many distributed systems, both the size and the number of a node's "inputs" (the messages it has received from other nodes) are not known.