Re: Proposed text on reliability in the web services architecture

Assaf Arkin wrote,
> From what I recall Byzantine failure (and the larger space of
> problems around it) describes a trust problem in group communication.
> Namely: how do I trust that you will process the message I sent you
> in the proper manner.

Not exactly. Byzantine failures are where nodes/links don't simply fail, 
they malfunction in a way which violates the protocol. The connection 
with trust issues is that an untrustworthy or malicious node is pretty 
much indistinguishable from a malfunctioning one.

I think byzantine failures are definitely worth consideration here, 
especially in connection with intermediaries and gateways ... eg. a 
gateway might accept a SOAP message for forwarding to an internal 
system, forward it to the internal system which fails silently, then 
ack at the SOAP level to the sender.

This is yet another example of why RM is an end to end characteristic of 
a communication mechanism. Gateways are an endpoint wrt WS messaging, 
but aren't endpoints wrt the application, which also includes the 
systems gateway'd to.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 06:33:36 UTC