Timeline Entanglement: A Method for Secure History Preservation in Distributed Systems

Title: Timeline Entanglement: A Method for Secure History Preservation in Distributed Systems

Abstract: Timeline Entanglement is a technique that allows multiple, independent services to maintain a single, tamper-evident history of their interactions. This method helps clients to preserve the provability of temporal relationships among system states, even when the systems involved are not cooperating or no longer exist. By linking the past of one timeline to the future of another, Timeline Entanglement provides a sound method to map a time step in the history of one service onto the timeline of another. This framework, implemented in the Timeweave service development framework, has been shown to be efficient and suitable for large-scale, loosely-coupled distributed systems.

Research Question: How can we create a method for maintaining a tamper-evident history across multiple, independent services in a distributed system?

Methodology: The researchers proposed Timeline Entanglement, a technique that links the histories of independent services by associating undeniable past events with future events. This method allows for the creation of a single, common timeline that spans across multiple services, providing a tamper-evident history of interactions.

Results: The researchers developed Timeweave, a service development framework that implements Timeline Entanglement. They evaluated the performance characteristics of Timeweave and found it to be efficient, with overhead of roughly 2-8% of a PC-grade system's processing resources. This makes it suitable for large-scale, loosely-coupled distributed systems.

Implications: Timeline Entanglement provides a solution to the problem of maintaining a tamper-evident history across multiple, independent services in a distributed system. This technique allows clients to verify the authenticity of historical information and to preserve the provability of temporal relationships among system states, even in the face of non-cooperation or system failure. The Timeweave framework, which implements Timeline Entanglement, has been shown to be efficient and suitable for large-scale systems, making this method a valuable tool for enhancing security and accountability in distributed systems.

Link to Article: https://arxiv.org/abs/0202005v1 Authors: arXiv ID: 0202005v1