Finding safe paths in a faulty environment

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of finding safe paths through a network, some of whose nodes may be faulty. By a safe path we mean one between two nodes that does not contain any faulty node. The kinds of faults that concern us are not limited to those that may cause a failure of a node or link, but include those that may cause a node to distort messages in arbitrary ways. Furthermore, we want a distributed algorithm to allow the network itself to discover suitable paths without depending on a central controller for the analysis. More broadly, we assume that each node has only local knowledge of the network structure.