Network layer protocols with Byzantine robustness.
Radia Perlman, 1988.

It was suggested to me that current proposals for secure routing protocols are suffering from folks not having actually read Perlman's 1988 thesis.

This page is intended to make the thesis easy to find, read, and print.

Abstract

The Network Layer of a network architecture is a distributed protocol that facilitates packet delivery across multiple hops. One of its chief functions is the calculation of routes throughout the network. Traditional Network Layer protocols have addressed robustness in the face of simple failures, i.e. nodes or links becoming inoperative. This thesis examines Network Layer protocol designs that are robust in the presence of Byzantine failures, i.e., nodes that through malice or malfunction exhibit arbitrary behavior such as corrupting, forging, or delaying routing protocol messages.

Printing

LCS provides PDF and PS files, with 300dpi scanned page images.

MIT-LCS-TR-429 -- pdf (11MB) , ps (39MB).

Reading it online

Thumbnails: 1-24, 25-48, 49-72, 73-96, 97-120, 121.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 -- 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 -- 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 -- 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 -- 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Title page
Acknowledgments
Contents, more
1 Introduction
  1.1 Overview
  1.2 Byzantine Generals Problem
  1.3 Public Key Cryptography
  1.4 OSI Reference Model
  1.5 Network Layer Protocols
  1.6 Levels of Robustness
  1.7 Our Model of Network Layer
  1.8 Motivation
  1.9 Current Network Robustness Designs
  1.10 Overview of Approach
2 Robust Flooding
  2.1 Overview
  2.2 A Robust Flooding Design
  2.3 Costs of This Design
  2.4 Motivations Behind the Above Design
  2.5 Fault Detection
  2.6 Variants
3 Robust Link State Routing
  3.1 Overview
  3.2 A Robust Link State Design
  3.3 Neighbor Discovery
  3.4 Packet Forwarding
  3.5 Find a Route
  3.6 Design Choices
  3.7 Hierarchical Networks
  3.8 Route Setup Variant of Source Routing
4 Conclusions
  4.1 Results
  4.2 Basic Tools
  4.3 Further Application of These Ideas
  4.4 Future Research

Cite

Perlman's 1988 MIT Ph.D. Thesis is the same as technical report MIT/LCS/TR-429.

Perlman, Radia Joy.
Network layer protocols with Byzantine robustness / Radia Perlman.
121 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.
Cambridge, Mass. : Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1988.
Supervised by Dave Clark.

From MIT's Barton catalog.


Mitchell N Charity <[email protected]>
Notes:
  The difficulty of finding the thesis stemmed in part from an imperfect
  robots.txt file having dropped the LCS publications database off google.
  LCS is currently distracted by a reorg, so here are two work-around links
  to restore indexing...
   all MIT LCS TR's
   all MIT LCS TM's
   ... which didn't help.
  So here's a mirror.
   TR's
   TM's

Doables:

History:
 2003-Sep-29  Still not indexed.  Trying again with a mirror.
 2003-Jul-22  Added links to get LCS Pubs indexed again.
 2003-Jul-08  Created.