SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/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 billions of internet connected things are added to our existing infrastructure, providing a trusted data layer will rise in importance to maintain reliability and security of our critical infrastructure, as many of these systems are mission and life-critical. Our proposed innovation will allow highly distributed and autonomous systems the ability to make decisions based on highly trusted data sources. Our innovation will enhance the practical applications of distributed computing fault tolerance and consensus (agreement) mechanisms by applying them to real-world, critically needed defense networks initially and to other critical infrastructure areas later. The commercial opportunity is to provide a missing piece of the puzzle to support a trusted data layer in the next generation, or Internet evolution. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to prototype a novel, next-generation Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) consensus algorithm to be plugged into open source DLTs to enhance the data and transaction integrity aspects under asynchronous (disconnected, flaky, or malicious) networking scenarios. The challenge is to provide the ability to maintain agreement and decision finality (or integrity) among consensus nodes operating in asynchronous (network partition, crash fault, byzantine fault) networking environments. In simpler terms, this means the ability to keep and store a file or update within a DLT node, even though the fault keeps the DLT update from taking place over an extended period of time. This capability is highly important when running DLTs in critical infrastructure networks. The research objectives are to combine local, hash-chained write-ahead journaling methods with state-of-the-art asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant (aBFT) consensus to prototype high data integrity (ability to retain all transactions, provide liveness guarantees, maintain local node state integrity, and maintain data ordering and timestamps) under asynchronous network conditions.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.

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.