SBIR Phase II: Novel Blockchain File System using aBFT Consensus

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛影响和商业潜力包括增强关键基础设施网络的安全性和信任度，用于国防、电网、医疗保健和新兴自主系统（即自动驾驶汽车和机器人）等应用，因为这些系统中的许多都是关键任务和关键生命。提议的创新将使分布式和自治系统能够基于高度可信的数据源做出决策。更重要的是，这项创新解决了客户在不稳定和不确定条件下阻止数据泄露和防止网络上未经授权的活动的直接需求。提出的创新将通过将分布式计算容错和共识机制应用于现实世界的关键基础设施网络来增强它们的实际应用。关键任务系统数据以每年10亿次的速度不断受到对手的攻击。对于关键任务系统来说，数据泄露是一个严重的问题，包括巨大的经济损失、潜在的任务失败，在某些情况下，甚至会导致生命危险的后果。保护这些数据/资料是这十年最大的市场机会之一，而建议的工作直接解决资料保障的问题。SBIR二期项目将推进一项创新，解决关键基础设施网络中维护关键任务数据完整性的复杂问题。通过将最先进的异步拜占庭容错（aBFT）共识算法的灵活部署与所提出的新颖文件系统创新相结合，所提出的创新简化了分布式系统中极其复杂的共识和容错科学，创建了非常有用的解决方案，以保护数据完整性，防止数据在不同的网络操作条件下受到损害，包括异步网络条件（拜占庭和崩溃故障场景），保留所有事务、提供活动性保证、维护本地节点状态完整性以及维护数据排序和时间戳的能力)。提出的文件系统解决方案旨在成为一个易于部署的软件平台，在系统的整个生命周期中保持数据安全、防篡改、可验证和可信。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impacts and commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project include the ability to enhance the security and trust of critical infrastructure networks for applications including defense, electric grids, health care, and emerging autonomous systems (i.e., self-driving vehicles and robotics), as many of these systems are mission- and life-critical. The proposed innovation will allow distributed and autonomous systems the ability to make decisions based on highly trusted data sources. More importantly, the innovation addresses an immediate customer need to stop data breaches and prevent unauthorized activity on networks under flaky and uncertain conditions. The proposed innovation will enhance the practical applications of distributed computing fault tolerance and consensus mechanisms by applying them to real-world critical infrastructure networks. Mission-critical systems data are constantly under attack by adversaries at the rate of a billion times per year. For mission-critical systems, compromised data is a serious problem including huge economic losses, potential for mission failures, and in some situations, life-critical consequences. Protecting that data/information is one of the biggest market opportunities of this decade and the proposed work addresses the concerns of information assurance directly.This SBIR Phase II project will advance an innovation that solves the complex problem of maintaining data integrity for mission-critical data within critical infrastructure networks. The proposed innovation simplifies the extremely complex science of consensus and fault tolerance in distributed systems by combining flexible deployment of state-of-the-art Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT)consensus algorithms with the proposed novel file system innovation, creating highly useful solution to protect data integrity before it can be compromised under varying network operating conditions including asynchronous network conditions (byzantine and crash fault scenarios, ability to retain all transactions, provide liveness guarantees, maintain local node state integrity, and maintain data ordering and timestamps). The proposed file system solution is designed to be an easy to deploy software platform that keeps data safe, tamper-resistant, verifiable, and trusted over the system’s life cycle.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.