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In aerospace environments, the data in a computer’s memory or CPU register could become corrupted by radiation, leading it to respond to other nodes in arbitrarily unpredictable ways. Since a system failure would be very expensive (e.g., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzantine faults [81, 82].
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In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with malicious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other blockchains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority
However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults. In your datacenter, all the nodes are controlled by your organization (so they can hopefully be trusted) and radiation levels are low enough that memory corruption is not a major problem. Protocols for making systems Byzantine fault-tolerant are quite complicated [84], and fault-tolerant embedded systems rely on support from the hardware level [81]. In most server-side data systems, the cost of deploying Byzantine fault-tolerant solutions makes them impractical.
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In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with malicious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other blockchains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority
However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults. In your datacenter, all the nodes are controlled by your organization (so they can hopefully be trusted) and radiation levels are low enough that memory corruption is not a major problem. Protocols for making systems Byzantine fault-tolerant are quite complicated [84], and fault-tolerant embedded systems rely on support from the hardware level [81]. In most server-side data systems, the cost of deploying Byzantine fault-tolerant solutions makes them impractical.