Evaluation and Design of Performable Distributed Systems

Performability measures system performance including quality, reliability, maintainability and availability over time, regardless of faults. This is challenging for distributed systems, since the internet was designed as a best-effort network that does not guarantee that data delivery meets a certain level of quality of service. In this chapter, we explain the design, test and performability evaluation of distributed systems by utilizing adversarial components. In our approach, the system design uses adversarial logic to make the system robust. In system test, we can leverage existing, powerful attacks to verify our design by using existing denial of service (DoS) attacks to stress the system.