Fireflies: Scalable Intrusion-Tolerant Membership
for Supporting Overlay Networks

Robbert van Renesse - Håvard Johansen


Fireflies is a scalable and intrusion-tolerant protocol for weakly consistent membership, or more popularly known as a One Hop Distributed Hash Table. While such a protocol cannot distinguish Byzantine members from correct members in general, it provides correct members with a reasonably current view of which members are live and which are not. The amount of data sent by correct members grows linearly with the aggregate rate of failures and recoveries. Fireflies tolerates Byzantine failures in that, with high probability, Byzantine participants cannot make a correct member look stopped, nor a stopped member look correct, nor cause a correct member to send large amounts of data and render the protocol unscalable. Fireflies has been deployed on PlanetLab.