The SATURNE project aims at a global approach to the tolerance of accidental faults and intentional interaction faults (i.e., intrusions) in distributed systems. This approach enables to tackle reliability and security problems in a unified way.
Within the scope of SATURNE project, a novel method has been developed to tolerate faults while preserving confidentiality. This method is called ``fragmentation-redundancy-scattering'' [4].
The fragmentation-redundancy-scattering (FRS) technique consists in splitting information into fragments such that individual fragments do not carry significant information, adding redundancy to the fragments in order to tolerate deletion or modification of some fragments, then to scatter these fragments throughout the distributed system. This technique is viewed as complementary with existing security techniques, such as protection and cryptography for instance. FRS has first been applied to a distributed file storage server and to a distributed security server. Recently, this work has been developed to improve the reliability of confidential information processing. This study lead us to look at the implementation of non-functional characteristics in object-oriented systems, in particular with meta-object protocols (see Section 3.1).
In parallel, a study is dedicated to fine-grain object protection and security and/or safety kernels (see Section 3.2). Another study is continuing on quantitative evaluation of security (see Section 3.3).