SBIR Phase I: Taekion Defense-hardened 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/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。随着数十亿的互联网连接设备被添加到我们现有的基础设施中，提供可信的数据层对于维护关键基础设施的可靠性和安全性将变得越来越重要，因为这些系统中的许多都是任务和生命关键型的。我们提出的创新将使高度分布式和自治的系统能够基于高度可信的数据源做出决策。我们的创新将增强分布式计算容错和共识（协议）机制的实际应用，首先将它们应用于现实世界，迫切需要的防御网络，然后应用于其他关键基础设施领域。商业机会是提供拼图中缺失的一块，以支持下一代可信数据层或Internet演进。这个SBIR第一阶段项目提出了一种新的、下一代分布式账本技术（DLT）共识算法的原型，该算法将被插入到开源的DLT中，以增强异步（断开连接、不稳定或恶意）网络场景下的数据和交易完整性。挑战在于提供在异步（网络分区、崩溃故障、拜占庭故障）网络环境中操作的共识节点之间维护协议和决策最终性（或完整性）的能力。简单地说，这意味着能够在DLT节点中保留和存储文件或更新，即使故障使DLT更新在很长一段时间内无法进行。在关键基础设施网络中运行dlt时，此功能非常重要。研究目标是将本地哈希链预写日志方法与最先进的异步拜占庭容错（aBFT）共识相结合，以在异步网络条件下原型化高数据完整性（保留所有事务的能力，提供活动性保证，维护本地节点状态完整性以及维护数据顺序和时间戳）。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 impact/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 billions of internet connected things are added to our existing infrastructure, providing a trusted data layer will rise in importance to maintain reliability and security of our critical infrastructure, as many of these systems are mission and life-critical. Our proposed innovation will allow highly distributed and autonomous systems the ability to make decisions based on highly trusted data sources. Our innovation will enhance the practical applications of distributed computing fault tolerance and consensus (agreement) mechanisms by applying them to real-world, critically needed defense networks initially and to other critical infrastructure areas later. The commercial opportunity is to provide a missing piece of the puzzle to support a trusted data layer in the next generation, or Internet evolution. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to prototype a novel, next-generation Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) consensus algorithm to be plugged into open source DLTs to enhance the data and transaction integrity aspects under asynchronous (disconnected, flaky, or malicious) networking scenarios. The challenge is to provide the ability to maintain agreement and decision finality (or integrity) among consensus nodes operating in asynchronous (network partition, crash fault, byzantine fault) networking environments. In simpler terms, this means the ability to keep and store a file or update within a DLT node, even though the fault keeps the DLT update from taking place over an extended period of time. This capability is highly important when running DLTs in critical infrastructure networks. The research objectives are to combine local, hash-chained write-ahead journaling methods with state-of-the-art asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant (aBFT) consensus to prototype high data integrity (ability to retain all transactions, provide liveness guarantees, maintain local node state integrity, and maintain data ordering and timestamps) under asynchronous network conditions.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.