SBIR Phase II: Novel Blockchain File System using aBFT Consensus

The broader impacts and commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project include the ability to enhance the security and trust of critical infrastructure networks for applications including defense, electric grids, health care, and emerging autonomous systems (i.e., self-driving vehicles and robotics), as many of these systems are mission- and life-critical. The proposed innovation will allow distributed and autonomous systems the ability to make decisions based on highly trusted data sources. More importantly, the innovation addresses an immediate customer need to stop data breaches and prevent unauthorized activity on networks under flaky and uncertain conditions. The proposed innovation will enhance the practical applications of distributed computing fault tolerance and consensus mechanisms by applying them to real-world critical infrastructure networks. Mission-critical systems data are constantly under attack by adversaries at the rate of a billion times per year. For mission-critical systems, compromised data is a serious problem including huge economic losses, potential for mission failures, and in some situations, life-critical consequences. Protecting that data/information is one of the biggest market opportunities of this decade and the proposed work addresses the concerns of information assurance directly. This SBIR Phase II project will advance an innovation that solves the complex problem of maintaining data integrity for mission-critical data within critical infrastructure networks. The proposed innovation simplifies the extremely complex science of consensus and fault tolerance in distributed systems by combining flexible deployment of state-of-the-art Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT)consensus algorithms with the proposed novel file system innovation, creating highly useful solution to protect data integrity before it can be compromised under varying network operating conditions including asynchronous network conditions (byzantine and crash fault scenarios, ability to retain all transactions, provide liveness guarantees, maintain local node state integrity, and maintain data ordering and timestamps). The proposed file system solution is designed to be an easy to deploy software platform that keeps data safe, tamper-resistant, verifiable, and trusted over the system’s life cycle. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.