Sean Peisert

ACM Distinguished Member

Upcoming activities:

IEEE Security & Privacy (ongoing)

NSA SoS Best Paper Competition (annually, deadlines in April)

IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice (annually, deadlines in July)

IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2025 (May 12–15, 2025)

NSPW 2025 (Aug 24–27, 2025)

NSF Cybersecurity Summit (Oct. 20–23 2025)

CSET 2025 (2025)

Research

Symbiosis in Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Intrusion Detection

Two principal components for providing protection in large-scale distributed systems are Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) and intrusion detection systems (IDS). BFT is used to implement strictly consistent replication of state in the face of arbitrary failures, including those introduced by malware and Internet pathogens. Intrusion detection relates to a broad set of services that detect events that could indicate the presence of an ongoing attack. But BFT traditionally suffers from high latency and replication requirements. But as these two components approach system security differently, we believe that intrusion detection has the potential to has the potential to improve BFT. The integration of these two efforts, at both the fundamental and system levels, is the theme of this research effort.

Researchers currently involved:

Matt Bishop (UC Davis)
Sisi Duan (UC Davis)
Karl Levitt (PI; UC Davis)
Keith Marzullo (PI; UC San Diego)
Alessandro Mei (Sapienza Univ. of Rome, Italy)
Hein Meling (Univ. of Stavanger, Norway)
Sean Peisert (Co-PI; UC Davis)
Jeff Rowe (UC Davis)
Haibin Zhang (UC Davis)

Sponsor: National Science Foundation CISE/CCF

Publications resulting from this project:

"A Self-Adaptive Middleware for Efficient Routing in Distributed Sensor Networks": Sisi Duan and Jingtao Sun; Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC2015), Hong Kong, October 9–12, 2015. [CDL]

"Towards a Self-Adaptive Middleware for Building Reliable Publish/Subscribe Systems": Sisi Duan, Jingtao Sun, and Sean Peisert,; Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems (IDCS), pp. 157–168, Windsor, Berkshire, United Kingdom, September 2–4, 2015. [BibTeX] [LNCS Book] [LNCS Chapter] [CDL]

"hBFT: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance With Minimum Cost": Sisi Duan, Sean Peisert, and Karl Levitt,; IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 12(1), pp. 58–70, Jan./Feb. 2015. (published online March 19, 2014) [BibTeX] [DOI] [CDL]

"BChain: Byzantine Replication with High Throughput and Embedded Reconfiguration": Sisi Duan, Hein Meling, Sean Peisert, and Haibin Zhang,; Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS), pp. 91–106, Cortina, Italy, December 15–19, 2014. [BibTeX] [DOI] [LNCS Book] [LNCS Chapter] [CDL]

"Building Reliable and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance": Sisi Duan,; Ph.D. Dissertation, Dept. of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, December 2014.

"Byzantine Fault Tolerance from Intrusion Detection": Sisi Duan, Karl Levitt, Hein Meling, Sean Peisert, and Haibin Zhang,; Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Nara, Japan, October 6–9, 2014. [BibTeX] [DOI] [CDL] (Best Paper Candidate Award)

"P2S: A Fault-Tolerant Publish/Subscribe Infrastructure": Tiancheng Chang, Sisi Duan, Hein Meling, Sean Peisert, and Haibin Zhang; Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event Based Systems (DEBS), pp. 189–197, Mumbai, India, May 26–29, 2014. [BibTeX] [DOI] [CDL]

"Principles of Authentication": Sean Peisert, Ed Talbot, and Tom Kroeger,; Proceedings of the 2013 New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), pp. 47–56, Banff, Canada, September 9–12, 2013. [BibTeX] [DOI] [OA] [CDL]

"Turtles All the Way Down: A Clean-Slate, Ground-Up, First-Principles Approach to Secure Systems": Sean Peisert, Ed Talbot, and Matt Bishop,; Proceedings of the 2012 New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), pp. 15–26, Bertinoro, Italy, September 19–21, 2012. [BibTeX] [DOI] [OA] [CDL]

"When You Don't Trust Clients: Byzantine Proposer Fast Paxos": Hein Meling, Keith Marzullo, and Alessandro Mei,; Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp. 193–202, Macau, China, June 18–21, 2012. [DOI]

"Brief Announcement: When You Don't Trust Clients: Byzantine Proposer Fast Paxos"

Keith Marzullo, Hein Meling, and Alessandro Mei

Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), pp. 143–144, Rome, Italy, Sept. 20–22, 2011.

The definitive versions of the papers posted on this page were first published in the venues indicated. In accordance with publisher copyright policies, these papers are pre-prints or post-prints, and are not the pubilsher's version.

Personal use of the material posted on this page is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the original publishers.

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Last modified: Saturday, 17-Oct-2015 09:26:00 PDT