Building Regular Registers with Rational Malicious Servers and Anonymous Clients -- Extended Version
This addresses security and reliability in distributed systems for applications requiring robust data storage, but it is incremental as it builds on existing register emulation models.
The paper tackles the problem of emulating a regular register in a synchronous distributed system with anonymous clients and rational malicious servers, proving the existence of an equilibrium and designing a protocol that forces servers to behave correctly.
The paper addresses the problem of emulating a regular register in a synchronous distributed system where clients invoking ${\sf read}()$ and ${\sf write}()$ operations are anonymous while server processes maintaining the state of the register may be compromised by rational adversaries (i.e., a server might behave as \emph{rational malicious Byzantine} process). We first model our problem as a Bayesian game between a client and a rational malicious server where the equilibrium depends on the decisions of the malicious server (behave correctly and not be detected by clients vs returning a wrong register value to clients with the risk of being detected and then excluded by the computation). We prove such equilibrium exists and finally we design a protocol implementing the regular register that forces the rational malicious server to behave correctly.