Revere Project Home Page

Paul Revere and his midnight ride in 1775 POEM by Longfellow 1860: Paul Revere's Ride History Paul Revere

In 1775, Paul Revere warned American people that Britain troops were coming. Now, the Revere project aims to notify Internet machines of new viruses or other attacks by quick dissemination of security updates.

Introduction

There are many situations where dissemination of security updates is highly needed. To disseminate security updates over Internet to large number of machines securely, quickly, adaptively and with high assurance is a very challenging work. We propose to achieve this by designing a system named Revere.

Revere provides service for other applications that need security updates. Revere can be used for dissemination of virus signature, software patches, new intrusion pattern, critical status exchanges in a distributed system, and so on.

Revere builds a self-organizing overlay network called RBone consisting of all Revere nodes. Each Revere node may forward security updates to others while receiving security updates for itself. In particular, the security of such a system is highly demanded. The secruity updates must be signed by a dissemination center. With the same importance, the formation and management of RBone must also be protected. Revere assumes each node can behave whatever it is pleased to do, while a good percentage of all Revere nodes are benign.

Since information dissemination is subject to some attacks for which encryption, signature, firewall, and so on can not deal with, such as information interception or redirection, Revere is designed to be able to provide redundant delivery, making an attacker harder to isolate a Revere node from getting security updates.

Documents