Decentralized Governance of Distributed Systems via Interaction Control

Abstract

Abstract. This paper introduces an abstract reference model, called interaction control (IC), for the governance of large and heterogeneous distributed systems. This model goes well beyond conventional access control, along a number of dimensions. In particular, the IC model has the following characteristics: (1) it is inherently decentralized, and thus scalable even for a wide range of stateful policies; (2) it is very general, and not biased toward any particular type of policies; thus providing a significant realization of the age-old principle of separation of policy from mechanism; and (3) it enables flexible, composition-free, interoperability between different policies. The IC model, which is an abstraction of a mechanism called law-governed interaction (LGI), has been designed as a minimalist reference model that can be reified into a whole family of potential control mechanisms that may support different types of communication, with different performance requirements and for different application domains.

On the Dependability of Highly Heterogeneous and Open Distributed Systems

“…That is, it should be able to handle a wide range Rof failures, by a possibly heterogeneous set Q of actors. As argued by the author in [36], such a wide spectrum recovery mechanism require the imposition of suitable regularities over a given system, which would enable: a) the sensing of the behavior of all members of Q; and b) exerting a degree of control over the failing actors in Q, such as is necessary for the recovery of from all failures of type R. It is, of course, hard to establish such regularities over the code of highly heterogeneous distributed system. But some regularities over the flow of messages, which can be helpful for recovery, can be established via the fabric of a GDS.…”

Establishing Global Policies over Decentralized Online Social Networks

“…One consequence of this is that the law L C of the given community C can be written so that members of C can interact only with other members of C. Now, Ltrust can be defined as follows: members of a community C can trust each other's interactive behavior to comply with their common law L C . For a complete definition of this trust modality and some of its consequences see [8].…”