HDR of Sonia Ben Mokhtar


Subject:
Contributions to Building Reliable Distributed Systems

Summary:

Thanks to the latest evolutions in hardware and networking technologies we are living in a world where networked computing systems are everywhere ranging from small/medium daily objects (e.g., watches, smart phones, cars) to large infrastructures (e.g., cloud platforms and data centers). On top of these computing systems a plethora of software systems/applications are invading our daily lives. Because of their intrinsic distribution and the involvement of more and more parties with sometimes conflicting interests, these systems are becoming bigger and increasingly more complex and thus more subject to faults. Beyond crash faults, two types of faults are often distinguished: Byzantine faults and rational faults. Byzantine faults are the most generic type of faults caused by nodes (e.g., software or hardware components running in a physical machine participating in the system) that may behave arbitrarily (e.g., by crashing, being subject to a bug, being under the control of a malicious attacker). Rational faults are caused by nodes trying to maximize their own benefit without contributing their fair share to the system. Dealing with Byzantine and/or rational faults in large scale distributed systems has been and still is a very active field of research. In the context of this habilitation defense I will present a set of research works I carried out since I joined the LIRIS lab with my PhD students and collaborators and that contribute to this field. I will finally sketch few perspectives in this very challenging and exciting research domain.


Defense date: thursday, december 21, 2017