Security and Privacy for Partial Order Time

Abstract

Partial order time expresses issues central to many problems in asynchronous distributed systems, but suffers from inherent security and privacy risks. Secure partial order clocks provide a general method to develop application protocols that transparently protect against these risks. Our previous Signed Vector Timestamp protocol provides a partial order time service with some security: no one can forge dependence on an honest process. However, that protocol still permits some forgery of dependence, permits all denial of precedence, and leaks private information. This paper uses secure coprocessors to improve the vector protocol: our new Sealed Vector Timestamp protocol detects both the presence and absence of causal paths even in the presense of malicious processes, and protects against some privacy risks as well. By solving these previously open security problems, our new protocol provides a foundation for incorporating security and privacy into distributed application protocols based on partial order time.

Secure coprocessing applications and research issues

“…Our earlier work [Sm94a] observes how this problem reduces to optimistic rollback in a partial order time model, which can be addressed using secure coprocessor techniques [Sm94a,SmTy94].…”

Efficient Analyzing General Dominant Relationship Based on Partial Order Models

“…Partial order has appeared in many computational models and there are a lot of applications involves with partial order issues, such as concurrent models [15], optimistic rollback recovery [25], biology [16], security [24] and preference query [11].…”

Privacy-preserving logical vector clocks using secure computation techniques

“…In [18] privacy of vector clocks has been achieved, but it comes at the cost of hardware support. It uses secure coprocessors to execute the code for vector clock timestamps wrapping the timestamps in encryption envelopes accessible only within the secure coprocessor.…”