What was MAFTIA?

MAFTIA was a long-term research project funded by the European Union under the Information Society .

Large network infrastructures, such as the Internet, are vital for citizens to benefit from the services provided by the Information Society. However, users must be able to 'trust' the services offered to them. Thus, it is critical to make such services dependable, and in particular resilient to malicious attacks perpetrated by external hackers or by corrupt insiders. In particular, systems must not just detect such attacks, but should be able to tolerate such attacks, i.e. remain operational without requiring time-consuming and potentially error-prone human intervention.

To the best of our knowledge, MAFTIA was the world's first project to investigate a comprehensive approach for tolerating both accidental faults and malicious attacks in large-scale distributed systems, thereby enabling them to remain operational during attack, without requiring time-consuming and potentially error-prone human intervention.

The MAFTIA consortium brought together significant expertise from the fault tolerance, distributed computing, cryptography, formal verification, computer security and intrusion detection communities.

Bringing together research groups from different disciplines resulted in novel work that bridged the gaps between those fields in many ways, including the integration of intrusion detection and fault tolerance concepts in the conceptual model, the recursive use of fault prevention and fault tolerance techniques to create trustworthy components, the use of distributed cryptography techniques for secure replication, group communication, authorization and secure trusted services, techniques for building intrusion-tolerant intrusion detection systems, and techniques for combining cryptographic and formal methods approaches for analysing security protocols.