The MAFTIA partners

The MAFTIA consortium brought together significant expertise from the fault tolerance, distributed computing, cryptography, formal verification, computer security and intrusion detection communities. Although the full set of MAFTIA partners had not worked together before, there had been extensive collaborations for a number of years between various of the partners, and thus the project was quickly able to establish good working relationships between all the partners, which made it possible for the consortium to build upon and integrate its previous research results.

University of Newcastle

The School of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle, the coordinating contractor for MAFTIA, has been involved in research on dependability, in particular on the structuring of fault-tolerant systems, for more than 30 years. Newcastle had overall responsibility for MAFTIA as project coordinator, and made technical contributions to MAFTIA's conceptual model, architecture, and middleware.

Universidade de Lisboa

The Navigators Group at the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL) contributed their expertise in the design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed systems, and defined the main architectural principles on which MAFTIA was based. They developed a suite of intrusion tolerant group communication protocols built on top of an architectural component called the Trusted Timely Computing Base (TTCB).

QinetiQ

The Systems Assurance Group of QinetiQ, Malvern, brought their expertise in the design and evaluation of security and safety-critical systems to the consortium, along with considerable insight into the concerns and problems of industry as well as strong links to the key industrial players. They applied their expertise in CSP and model checking to the verification and assessment of several key protocols and components of the MAFTIA architecture, including some of the services provided by the TTCB.

IBM Zurich

IBM Zurich Research Lab provided two different areas of expertise to MAFTIA. The Network Security and Cryptography group provided strong expertise in cryptographic algorithms and protocols, and contributed to activities aimed at supporting dependable middleware and distributed trusted third parties. The Global Security Analysis Laboratory led the work devoted to the specification, design and implementation of an intrusion-tolerant intrusion-detection system.

LAAS

The Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance Research Group at LAAS has a long experience in both designing and validating fault-tolerant systems, and had a major role in defining the IFIP Working Group 10.4 basic concepts and terminology on dependable computing. They were among the first to pioneer the idea of using fault-tolerance to address malicious, intentional faults. LAAS were a major contributor to the MAFTIA work on concepts and architecture, and also developed an intrusion-tolerant authorisation system for MAFTIA.

Saarland University

The Cryptography and Security Group of Saarland University has strong expertise in cryptography, in particular the design, definition and proof of larger protocols. Their main role was in the work on verification and assessment, where they developed rigorous cryptographic models that were used to prove the security of selected MAFTIA protocols.