Abstract: A fault-tolerant and secure on-line certification authority uses replication to achieve availability. A client request is forwarded to a delegate server. The delegate forwards the request to all certification servers. After receiving responses from a quorum of certification servers, the delegate sends a client response including a threshold signature protocol to sign the client response. The delegate then forwards the client response to the client.

Abstract: In a fault-tolerant computer system, a primary replica supervisor is interposed between an operating system and a primary replica of an application program being executed by a primary processor. An object-code editor locates calls to the operating system and loops in the application program and inserts instruction sequences that enable the replica supervisor to intercept the calls to the operating system, results returned by the operating system as a result of the calls and asynchronous events delivered by the operating system to the replica. A backup replica supervisor is similarly interposed between an operating system and a backup replica of the application program being executed by a backup processor. The primary replica interacts with an environment.

Abstract: In a fault-tolerant computer system, a primary replica supervisor is interposed between an operating system and a primary replica of an application program being executed by a primary processor. An object-code editor locates calls to the operating system and loops in the application program and inserts instruction sequences that enable the replica supervisor to intercept the calls to the operating system, results returned by the operating system as a result of the calls and asynchronous events delivered by the operating system to the replica. A backup replica supervisor is similarly interposed between an operating system and a backup replica of the application program being executed by a backup processor. The primary replica interacts with an environment.

Abstract: A fault-tolerant computer system has primary and backup computers. Primary and backup virtual machines running on the computers are controlled by corresponding virtual machine monitors. The virtual machines execute only user-mode instructions, while all kernel-mode instructions are trapped and handled by the virtual machine monitors. Each computer has a recovery register that generates a hardware interrupt each time that a specified number of instructions, called an epoch, are executed. Prior to failure of the primary computer, the backup computer's virtual machine monitor converts all I/O instructions into no-ops and the primary computer sends copies of all I/O interrupts to the backup computer.