The Navigators Group, Universidade de Lisboa

The Navigators group, is one of the groups of (LASIGE), the Large-Scale Informatic Systems Laboratory, a research unit of the Department of Informatics of the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidade de Lisboa.

Lisbon was a major contributor to the conceptual model and architecture, and worked together with IBM Zurich and Newcastle to develop an intrusion-tolerant middleware. Throughout the project three key ideas on distributed systems architecture were explored:

We studied the concept of wormholes, which are enhanced subsystems that provide components with a means to obtain a few simple privileged functions and channels to other components, with "good" properties otherwise not guaranteed by the "normal" weak environment.

We explored the concept of architectural hybridization, a well-founded way to substantiate the provision of those "good" properties on "weak" environments. For example, the system can be augmented with a component that can be proved secure and timely (Trusted Timely Computing Base (TTCB)).

We investigated a new style of protocols for achieving intrusion tolerance, which for the most part execute in insecure environments, and resort to the TTCB only in crucial parts of their operation.

People at Lisboa

These people worked on MAFTIA. Names in bold are Executive Board members, others are Research Associates.

Miguel Correia
Nuno Ferreira Neves
Nuno Miguel Neves
Paulo Veríssimo