Sentinels and Twins: Effective Integrity Assessment for Distributed Computation

Distributed computing supports large scale and data-intensive computations with the cooperation of a multitude of parties, each responsible for a portion of the workload. Such parties are often not fully reliable and may return incorrect results. In this article, we address the problem of assessing the integrity of the computation results. We provide a comprehensive characterization of two techniques, sentinels and twins, evaluating their effectiveness and synergy. Sentinels are pre-computed tasks whose result is known apriori, and enable checking returned results against a ground truth. Twins are replicated tasks assigned to different workers, and enable cross-checking returned results for a same task. The analysis considers many questions that arise in the design of a concrete integrity assessment strategy and identifies the parameters that have a critical impact on the overall protection. Our model enables to tune the integrity controls so to achieve best effectiveness. The model can be applied to a variety of scenarios and offers guidelines that can find extensive application.