Alysson Neves Bessani's Personal Page

I'm an invited assistant professor at Informatics Department of Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, on Lisbon, Portugal. I'm also member of LaSIGE (Large Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory) group where I'm involved in several research projects with the Navigators team. Recently, I've spent the Spring 2010 semester on leave to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab working in the PDL (Parallel Data Lab).

"Those who fall in love with Practice without Theory are like the seaman on a boat without a steering wheel or a compass, who is never sure where he'll land."
(Leonardo da Vinci)

"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple."
(Charles Mingus)

News

- EWDCC’11: 1st European Workshop on Dependable Computing (together with EDCC’11)

- BFT-SMaRt: on the road for real BFT systems

Research

Research Interests: Distributed Algorithms, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Distributed Systems, Coordination and Computational Security.

Selected Papers

Pedro Costa, Marcelo Pasin, Alysson Bessani, Miguel Correia. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant MapReduce: Faults are not just Crashes. CloudCom’11: The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing and Science. Athens, Greece. December 2011. pdf

Giuliana Veronese, Miguel Correia, Alysson Bessani, Lau Lung, Paulo Verissimo. Efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance. IEEE Transactions on Computers. To appear. October 2011. pdf (A supplement with correctness proofs is also available).

Miguel Garcia, Alysson Bessani, Ilir Gashi, Nuno Neves, Rafael Obelheiro. OS Diversity for Intrusion Tolerance: Myth or Reality? DSN'11: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. Hong Kong, China, June 2011. pdf

Alysson Bessani, Miguel Correia, Bruno Quaresma, Fernando André, Paulo Sousa. DepSky: Dependable and Secure Storage in a Cloud-of-Clouds. EuroSys'11: The 6th ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Systems Conference. Salzburg, Austria. April 2011. pdf

Luis T. A. N. Brandão, Alysson Bessani. On the Reliability and Availability of Systems Tolerant to Steath Intrusion. LADC'11: The 5th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing. São José dos Campos, Brazil. April 2011. pdf

Giuliana Veronese, Miguel Correia, Alysson Bessani, Lau Lung. EBAWA: Efficient Byzantine Agreement for Wide-Area Networks. HASE'10: The 12th IEEE International High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium. San Jose, CA, USA. November 2010. pdf

Alysson Bessani, Miguel Correia, Paulo Sousa. Active Quorum Systems. HotDep'10: Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability. Vancouver, Canada. October 2010. pdf (A technical report with AQS specification and correctness proofs is also available).

Eduardo Adilio Pelinson Alchieri, Alysson Neves Bessani, Joni da Silva Fraga. A Dependable Infrastructure for Cooperative Web Services Coordination. International Journal of Web Services Research. Vol. 7, Num. 2, pp. 43-64. Idea Group Publishing. 2010. pdf (A preliminary version appeared on IEEE ICWS 2008).

Paulo Sousa, Alysson Neves Bessani, Miguel Correia, Nuno Ferreira Neves, Paulo Verissimo. Highly Available Intrusion-Tolerant Services with Proactive-Reactive Recovery. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. IEEE Computer Society. April 2010 (vol. 21, no. 4), pp. 452-465. pdf (A preliminary version appeared on IEEE PRDC'07).

Eduardo Alchieri, Alysson Neves Bessani, Fernando Carlos Pereira, Joni da Silva Fraga. Proactive Byzantine Quorum Systems. DOA'09: XI International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications. Vilamoura, Portugal. November 2009 . pdf

Giuliana Santos Veronese, Miguel Correia, Alysson Neves Bessani, Lau Cheuk Lung. Spin One's Wheels? Byzantine Fault Tolerance with a Spinning Primary. SRDS'09: The 30th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. Niagara Falls, USA, September 2009 . pdf

Alysson Neves Bessani, Miguel Correia, Joni da Silva Fraga, Lau Cheuk Lung. An Efficient Byzantine-Resilient Tuple Space. IEEE Transactions on Computers. IEEE Computer Society. August 2009 (vol. 58 no. 8) pp. 1080-1094. pdf (A preliminary version appeared on NCA'07).

Wagner Saback Dantas, Alysson Neves Bessani, Miguel Correia. Not Quickly, Just in Time: Improving the Timeliness and Reliability of Control Traffic in Utility Networks. HotDep'09: Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability. Lisbon, Portugal. June 2009 . pdf

Paulo Sousa, Alysson Neves Bessani, Wagner S. Dantas, Fabio Souto, Miguel Correia, Nuno F. Neves. Intrusion-Tolerant Self-Healing Devices fror Critical Infrastructure Protection. DSN'09: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. Lisbon, Portugal, July 2009 . pdf

Alysson Neves Bessani, Miguel Correia, Joni da Silva Fraga, Lau Cheuk Lung. Sharing Memory between Byzantine Processes using Policy-Enforced Tuple Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. IEEE Computer Society. March 2009 (vol. 20 no. 3) pp. 419-43. pdf (A preliminary version appeared on ICDCS'06).

Alysson Neves Bessani, Paulo Sousa, Miguel Correia, Nuno Ferreira Neves, Paulo Verissimo. The Crutial Way of Critical Infrastructure Protection. IEEE Security & Privacy, IEEE Computer Society. November/December 2008. pdf

Eduardo Adilio Pelinson Alchieri, Alysson Neves Bessani, Joni da Silva Fraga, Fabíola Greve. Byzantine Consensus with Unknown Participants. OPODIS'08: The 12th International Conference On Principles Of DIstributed Systems. Luxor, Egypt. December 2008. pdf

Miguel Correia, Alysson Neves Bessani, Paulo Verissimo. On Byzantine Generals with Alternative Plans. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol. 68, Issue 9, pages 1291-1296, Elsevier. September 2008. DOI.

Alysson Neves Bessani, Eduardo Adilio Pelinson Alchieri, Miguel Correia, Joni da Silva Fraga. DepSpace: A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Coordination Service. EuroSys'08: The 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Systems Conference. Glasgow, Scotland. April 2008 (Also published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 42 , issue 4, pages 163-176, May 2008). pdf

Wagner Saback Dantas, Alysson Neves Bessani, Joni da Silva Fraga, Miguel Correia. Evaluating Byzantine Quorum Systems. SRDS'07: The 26th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. Beijing, China. October 2007. pdf

Alysson Neves Bessani, Miguel Correia, Henrique Moniz, Nuno Ferreira Neves, Paulo Verissimo. When 3f+1 is not Enough: Tradeoffs for Decentralized Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus. DISC 2007: 21st International Symposium on Distributed Computing. Lemesos, Cyprus. September 2007. pdf

Alysson Neves Bessani, Joni da Silva Fraga, Lau Cheuk Lung. Extending the UMIOP Specification for Reliable Multicast in CORBA. DOA'05: VII International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 3760. Larnaca, Cyprus. October 2005. pdf

Alysson Neves Bessani, Joni da Silva Fraga, Lau Cheuk Lung, Eduardo Adilio Pelinson Alchieri. Active Replication in CORBA: Standards, Protocols and Implementation Framework. DOA'04: VI International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol 3291. Larnaca, Cyprus. October 2004. pdf

Current Research Projects
BFT-SMaRt
TCLOUDS (EU FP7 IP)
MASSIF (EU FP7 IP)
SecFuNet (ICT EU-BR)

ReD (FCT)
ReGenesys (FCT)
CloudFIT (FCT)
Diverse (FCT)
RC-Clouds (FCT)

Past Research Projects
CRUTIAL (EU)
Forever (EU/RESIST NoE)

Software
BFT-SMaRt (a BFT state machine replication)
DepSpace
JITT - Java Intrusion Tolerant Tools

Current Students

Luís Brandão (PhD, ECE CMU/UL, Co-advised with Virgil Gligor)
João Sousa (PhD, UL)
Miguel Garcia (PhD, UL, Co-advised with Nuno Ferreira Neves)
Tiago Oliveira (MsC, UL, Co-advised with Marcelo Pasin)
Oleksandr Malichevskyy (MsC, UL, Co-advised with Marcelo Pasin)
Ricardo Mendes (MsC, UL, Co-advised with Marcelo Pasin)
João Félix (MsC, UL, Co-advised with Miguel Correia)
Paulo Ferreira (MsC, CMU/UL)

Past Students

Eduardo Alchieri (PhD 2011, DAS UFSC-Brazil, Co-advised with Joni da Silva Fraga), now at UNB, Brazil
Many master students... to be updated soon :-)

Teaching

Informatics Engineering
Distributed Systems (2007/2008-1, 2008/2009-1, 2009/2010-1, 2010/2011-1, 2011/2012-1)
Security (2007/2008-2, 2008/2009-2, 2011/2012-2)
Informatics Security (2007/2008-2, 2008/2009-2, 2011/2012-2)

CMU-Portugal Masters in Information Security
Intrusion Tolerance (2009/2010-2, 2010/2011-2)

Masters in Informatics/Informatics Engineering
Distributed Systems Programming (2010/2011-1)

Information and Communication Technology
Distributed Applications (2008/2009-1, 2009/2010-1)
Informatics Security (2007/2008-2, 2008/2009-2)

Fun

In my free time I enjoy a lot of things such as tabletop wargamming, surfing, running, videogames and reading (mainly comics). Some related links:
Wargamming (mainly Warhammer and Warhammer 40K)
Essencia (my surf school at Costa da Caparica)

Last Updated at January 27, 2012.