A scheme for auditing causal relationships in group oriented distributed systems

Auditability is an important aspect of information security. In a distributed computation environment, one may therefore want to prevent corrupt processes from denying or forging causal relationships between events. The goal of the auditing service is to collect, maintain, make available, and validate irrefutable evidence regarding causal relationships between the process communication groups in group oriented distributed systems, and a new approach to audit causal relationships between the process communication groups in group oriented distributed systems is proposed. The authors affirm that the denial of existing causal relationships and the forgery of nonexistent causal relationships in group oriented distributed systems can be correctly audited by the proposed approach. Also, auditing the causal delivery ordering for the group multicast communication can be actually achieved. Moreover, the effectiveness and applications of the proposed auditing approach are also presented