Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Architecture in Cloud Data Management

One of the main challenges in cloud computing is to build a healthy and efficient storage for securely managing and preserving data. This means a cloud service provider needs to make sure that its clients' outsourced data are stored securely and, data queries and retrievals are executed correctly and privately. On the other hand, it may also mean businesses are willing to outsource their data to a third party only if they trust their data are not accessible and visible to the service provider and other non-authorized parties. However, one of the major obstacles faced here for ensuring data reliability and security is Byzantine faults. While Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) has received growing attention from the academic research community, the research done is generally from the distributed computing point of view, and hence finds little practical use in cloud computing. To that end, the focus of this paper is to discuss how these faults can be tolerated with the authors' proposed conceptualization of Byzantine data faults and fault-tolerant architecture in cloud data management.