Tobias Distler

PD Dr.-Ing. habil. Tobias Distler

Department Informatik (INF)
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Systemsoftware)

Raum: Raum 0.039
Martensstraße 1
91058 Erlangen

Selected Publications

PODC 2024
SIGACT Research Highlights Nomination

Diogo Avelãs, Hasan Heydari, Eduardo Alchieri, Tobias Distler, Alysson Bessani. Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 43rd Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '24), Nantes, 17–21 June 2024. (BibTeX, Extended version)

Middleware 2024

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Targeting Tail Latency in Replicated Systems with Proactive Rejection. In Proceedings of the 25th Middleware Conference (Middleware '24), Hong Kong, 2–6 December 2024. (BibTeX, Artifact, Source code)

RTAS 2024

Harald Böhm, Tobias Distler, and Peter Wägemann. TinyBFT: Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '24), pages 225–238, Hong Kong, 13–16 May 2024. (BibTeX, Source code)

ROBUST 2024

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Tough on the Outside, Reliable on the Inside: Utilizing System Composition for Improved Resilience. Presented at the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24), 13–14 March 2024.

Harald Böhm and Tobias Distler. Memory-Efficient Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Systems. Presented at the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24), 13–14 March 2024.

DSN 2023

Tobias Distler, Michael Eischer, and Laura Lawniczak. Micro Replication. In Proceedings of the 53rd International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '23), pages 123–137, Porto, 27–30 June 2023. (BibTeX, Specification and source code)

CoRR 2023

Alysson Bessani, Miguel Correia, Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo, Jiangshan Yu. Vivisecting the Dissection: On the Role of Trusted Components in BFT Protocols. In Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 10 December 2023. (BibTeX)

CSUR 2021

Tobias Distler. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant State-Machine Replication from a Systems Perspective. In ACM Computing Surveys, 54(1):24:1–38, 2021. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2020
Best Student Paper

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Resilient Cloud-based Replication with Low Latency. In Proceedings of the 21st Middleware Conference (Middleware '20), pages 14–28, Delft, 7–11 December 2020. (BibTeX, Extended version)

ECRTS 2018
Outstanding Paper

Peter Wägemann, Christian Dietrich, Tobias Distler, Peter Ulbrich, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Whole-System Worst-Case Energy-Consumption Analysis for Energy-Constrained Real-Time Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS '18), pages 24:1–24:25, Barcelona, 3–6 July 2018. (BibTeX)

DAIS 2018
Best Paper

Christopher Eibel, Christian Gulden, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Tobias Distler. Strome: Energy-Aware Data-Stream Processing. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS '18), pages 40–57, Madrid, 18–20 June 2018. (BibTeX)

The full list of publications can be found below.

Honors

SIGACT Research Highlights Nomination

Nomination for the SIGACT Research Highlights 2024 for the PODC '24 paper "Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance"

Teaching Award

FAU Faculty of Engineering Teaching Award 2023

Habilitation Award

Wolfgang Finkelnburg Habilitation Award 2022

Teaching Award

FAU Teaching Award for Junior Researchers 2021

Best Student Paper Award

Best Student Paper Award at the 21st Middleware Conference (Middleware '20) for the paper "Resilient Cloud-based Replication with Low Latency"

Best Paper Award

Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS '18) for the paper "Strome: Energy-Aware Data-Stream Processing"

Outstanding Paper Award

Outstanding Paper Award at the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS '18) for the paper "Whole-System Worst-Case Energy-Consumption Analysis for Energy-Constrained Real-Time Systems"

Ph.D. Award IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award for the 2012-2013 academic year
Dissertation Award Nomination FAU nominee for the 2014 GI Dissertation Award

Ongoing Research

Network-based services such as distributed databases, file systems, or blockchains are essential parts of today's computing infrastructures and therefore must be able to withstand a wide spectrum of fault scenarios, including hardware crashes, software failures, and attacks. Although a variety of state-machine replication protocols exist that provide fault and intrusion tolerance, it is inherently difficult to build dependable systems based on their complex and often incomplete specifications. Unfortunately, this commonly leads to systems being vulnerable against correlated failures or attacks, for example, in cases where, to save development and maintenance costs, all replicas in a system share the same homogeneous implementation.

In the Mirador project, we seek to eliminate this gap between theory and practice, proposing a novel paradigm for the specification and implementation of dependable systems: micro replication. In contrast to existing systems, micro-replication architectures do not consist of a few monolithic and complex replicas, but instead are organized as dedicated, loosely coupled micro-replica clusters that are each responsible for a different protocol step or mechanism. As a key benefit of providing only a small subset of the overall protocol functionality, micro replicas make it significantly easier to reason about the completeness and correctness of both specifications as well as implementations. To further reduce complexity, all micro replicas follow a standardized internal work flow, thereby greatly facilitating the task of introducing heterogeneity at the replica, communication, and authentication level.

Starting from this basic concept, in the Mirador project we explore micro replication as a means to build dependable replicated systems and examine its flexibility by developing micro-replication architectures for different fault models (i.e., crashes and Byzantine faults). In particular, our research focuses on two problem areas: First, we aim at increasing the resilience of micro-replicated systems by enabling them to recover from replica failures. Among other things, this requires mechanisms for rejuvenating micro replicas from a clean state and integrating replacement replicas at runtime. Second, our goal is to improve the performance and efficiency of micro-replicated systems and the applications running on top of them. Specifically, this includes the design of techniques to reduce overheads by exploiting optimistic approaches that save processor and network resources in the absence of faults. Furthermore, we investigate ways to restructure the service logic and for example outsource preprocessing steps to upstream micro-replica clusters. To evaluate the concepts, protocols, and mechanisms developed in the Mirador project, we build a heterogeneous micro-replicated platform that allows us to conduct experiments for a wide range of different settings and with a variety of applications.

The Mirador project is funded for 3 years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 541017677.

Selected Publications

Middleware 2024

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Targeting Tail Latency in Replicated Systems with Proactive Rejection. In Proceedings of the 25th Middleware Conference (Middleware '24), Hong Kong, 2–6 December 2024. (BibTeX, Artifact, Source code)

DSN 2023

Tobias Distler, Michael Eischer, and Laura Lawniczak. Micro Replication. In Proceedings of the 53rd International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '23), pages 123–137, Porto, 27–30 June 2023. (BibTeX, Specification and source code)

Open-Source Prototype

Mirador Implementation of the first micro-replication protocol

The aviation industry has an increasing demand for digitization in both administrative as well as operative areas, thereby maintaining and ideally further improving existing safety standards. The BALu project contributes to these efforts by researching approaches to leverage the potential of distributed ledger systems in general, and blockchain technology in particular. Specifically, the project focuses on two application scenarios: (1) a blockchain-based solution enabling the complete and audit-proof documentation of all components throughout an aircraft's entire life cycle, and (2) a decentralized flight-data recorder for unmanned air vehicles that reliably distributes the collected information among multiple drones and ground stations in order to ensure the availability of recordings even if the original storage device is destroyed.

The BALu project is funded for 2 years by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK).

For more information, please visit the project's CRIS page.

Selected Publications

RTAS 2024

Harald Böhm, Tobias Distler, and Peter Wägemann. TinyBFT: Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '24), pages 225–238, Hong Kong, 13–16 May 2024. (BibTeX, Source code)

Open-Source Prototype

TinyBFT A BFT library for tiny embedded devices

Coordination services such as ZooKeeper are essential building blocks of today's data-center infrastructures as they provide processes of distributed applications with means to exchange messages, to perform leader election, to detect machine or process crashes, or to reliably store configuration data. Providing an anchor of trust for their client applications, coordination services have to meet strong requirements regarding stability and performance. Only this way, it is possible to ensure that a coordination service neither is a single point of failure nor becomes the bottleneck of the entire system.

To address drawbacks of state-of-the-art systems, the EDC project develops approaches that enable coordination services to meet the stability and performance demands. Amongst other things, this includes making these services resilient against both benign and malicious faults, integrating mechanisms for extending the service functionality at runtime in order to minimize communication and synchronization overhead, as well as designing system architectures for effectively and efficiently exploiting the potential of multi-core servers. Although focusing on coordination services, the developed concepts and techniques are expected to also be applicable to other domains, for example, replicated data stores.

For more information, please visit the project's CRIS page.

Selected Publications

PaPoC 2023

Laura Lawniczak, Marco Ammon, and Tobias Distler. Generic Checkpointing Support for Stream-based State-Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '23), Rome, 8 May 2023. (BibTeX)

DSN 2017

Rainer Schiekofer, Johannes Behl, and Tobias Distler. Agora: A Dependable High-Performance Coordination Service for Multi-Cores. In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '17), pages 333–344, Denver, 26–29 June 2017. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2015

Tobias Distler, Christopher Bahn, Alysson Bessani, Frank Fischer, and Flavio Junqueira. Extensible Distributed Coordination. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15), pages 143–158, Bordeaux, 21–24 April 2015. (BibTeX)

The processing of large amounts of data on distributed execution platforms such as MapReduce or Heron contributes significantly to the energy consumption of today's data centers. The E³ project aims at minimizing the power consumption of such execution environments without sacrificing performance. For this purpose, the project develops means to make execution environments and data-processing platforms energy aware and to enable them to exploit knowledge about applications to dynamically adapt the power consumption of the underlying hardware. To measure and control the energy consumption of hardware units, E³'s energy-aware platforms rely on hardware features provided by modern processors that allow the system software of a server to regulate the server's power usage at runtime by enforcing configurable upper limits. As a key benefit, this approach makes it possible to build data-processing and execution platforms that, on the one hand, save energy during phases in which only low and medium workloads need to be handled and, on the other hand, are still able to offer full processing power during periods of high workloads.

For more information, please visit the project's CRIS page.

Selected Publications

PaPoC 2023

Laura Lawniczak, Marco Ammon, and Tobias Distler. Generic Checkpointing Support for Stream-based State-Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '23), Rome, 8 May 2023. (BibTeX)

EDCC 2021

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Stream-based State Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 17th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '21), pages 119–126, Munich, 13–16 September 2021. (BibTeX, Extended version, Source code)

DAIS 2018
Best Paper

Christopher Eibel, Christian Gulden, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Tobias Distler. Strome: Energy-Aware Data-Stream Processing. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS '18), pages 40–57, Madrid, 18–20 June 2018. (BibTeX)

Finished Projects

Internet-based services play a central role in today's society. With such services progressively taking over from traditional infrastructures, their complexity steadily increases. On the downside, this leads to more and more faults occurring. As improving software-engineering techniques alone will not do the job, systems have to be prepared to tolerate faults and intrusions. REFIT investigates how systems can provide fault and intrusion tolerance in a resource-efficient manner. The key technology to achieve this goal is virtualization, as it enables multiple service instances to run in isolation on the same physical host. Server consolidation through virtualization not only saves resources in comparison to traditional replication, but also opens up new possibilities to apply optimizations (e.g., deterministic multi-threading). Resource efficiency and performance of the REFIT prototype are evaluated using a web-based multi-tier architecture, and the results are compared to non-replicated and traditionally-replicated scenarios. Furthermore, REFIT develops an infrastructure that supports the practical integration and operation of fault and intrusion-tolerant services; for example, in the context of cloud computing.

The REFIT project was funded for 6 years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 157267460.

For more information, please visit the project's CRIS page.

Selected Publications

CSUR 2021

Tobias Distler. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant State-Machine Replication from a Systems Perspective. In ACM Computing Surveys, 54(1):24:1–38, 2021. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2020
Best Student Paper

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Resilient Cloud-based Replication with Low Latency. In Proceedings of the 21st Middleware Conference (Middleware '20), pages 14–28, Delft, 7–11 December 2020. (BibTeX, Extended version)

EuroSys 2017

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Hybrids on Steroids: SGX-based High Performance BFT. In Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '17), pages 222–237, Belgrade, 23–26 April 2017. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2015

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Consensus-Oriented Parallelization: How to Earn Your First Million. In Proceedings of the 16th Middleware Conference (Middleware '15), pages 173–184, Vancouver, 7–11 December 2015. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2012

Rüdiger Kapitza, Johannes Behl, Christian Cachin, Tobias Distler, Simon Kuhnle, Seyed Vahid Mohammadi, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Klaus Stengel. CheapBFT: Resource-efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '12), pages 295–308, Bern, 10–13 April 2012. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2011

Tobias Distler and Rüdiger Kapitza. Increasing Performance in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems with On-Demand Replica Consistency. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '11), pages 91–105, Salzburg, 10–13 April 2011. (BibTeX)

NDSS 2011

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Ivan Popov, Hans P. Reiser, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. SPARE: Replicas on Hold. In Proceedings of the 18th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '11), pages 407–420, San Diego, 6–9 February 2011. (BibTeX)

Open-Source Prototypes

REFIT Implementation of multiple agreement protocols and system architectures
Tara Implementation of the first stream-based replication protocol

The goal of the TClouds project is to provide a computing and network platform to enable resilient and privacy-enabled deployment of Internet-scale critical information and communication infrastructures. The aim is to achieve this while addressing the challenges of cross-border privacy, end-user usability, and acceptance, which are essential for wide deployment of such an infrastructure. Our contribution to the TClouds project concentrates on the following aspects:

Security-enhanced Cloud Components: Cloud computing services are based on individual components such as storage, networks, and virtual machines. We aid in securing these components to prevent data leakage and improve the resilience of applications and individual machines. In order to achieve these goals, we focus on specialized run-time environments and tailored virtualization support.

Middleware for Adaptive Resilience: Our task is the development of approaches for resource-efficient intrusion-tolerant services and to focus on implementation of reactive behavior to address attacks and faults. This will be realized by defining programming interfaces with specific focus on virtualization and checkpointing of applications. Furthermore, the outcomes of the security-enhanced cloud components will be integrated and tested.

The TClouds project was funded for 3 years by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 257243.

For more information, please visit the project's CRIS page.

Selected Publications

EuroSys 2012

Rüdiger Kapitza, Johannes Behl, Christian Cachin, Tobias Distler, Simon Kuhnle, Seyed Vahid Mohammadi, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Klaus Stengel. CheapBFT: Resource-efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '12), pages 295–308, Bern, 10–13 April 2012. (BibTeX)

SSS 2012

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. DQMP: A Decentralized Protocol to Enforce Global Quotas in Cloud Environments. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS '12), pages 217–231, Toronto, 1–4 October 2012. (BibTeX)

CloudCP 2012

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, Florian Heisig, Rüdiger Kapitza, Matthias Schunter. Providing Fault-tolerant Execution of Web-Service-based Workflows within Clouds. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms (CloudCP '12), pages 39–44, Bern, 10 April 2012. (BibTeX)

In today's world, computing systems are continuously exposed to the threat of malicious attacks. Large-scale distributed systems nowadays are likely to suffer from vulnerabilities, and the increasing complexity of software makes it unlikely that vulnerabilities will disappear soon. An intrusion-tolerant system is one that continues to function properly in spite of malicious intrusions in some parts of the systems. However, the number of simultaneous intrusions that such a system can tolerate is limited. Given enough time, there is the chance that an attacker compromises more parts of the system than the system can tolerate. Proactive recovery is an important mechanism to remedy this problem. Proactive recovery periodically cleans up replicas of a service. In the recovery operation, the replica is re-initialized to an clean state, removing all potential malicious intrusions. This step is performed independent of whether an intrusion actually happened. This approach guarantees correct system operations as long as nodes are recovered more frequently than an attacker can compromise them. VM-FIT is a novel system that harnesses virtualization technology for building dependable distributed systems with proactive recovery. The virtualization-based approach yields a hybrid system model with low replication costs. It allows minimizing the impact that the proactive recovery has on system operations. Furthermore, it allows an efficient implementation of secure distributed state transfer.

For more information, please visit the project's Web page.

Selected Publications

NDSS 2011

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Ivan Popov, Hans P. Reiser, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. SPARE: Replicas on Hold. In Proceedings of the 18th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '11), pages 407–420, San Diego, 6–9 February 2011. (BibTeX)

SICHERHEIT 2010

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Hans P. Reiser. State Transfer for Hypervisor-Based Proactive Recovery of Heterogeneous Replicated Services. In Proceedings of the 5th "Sicherheit, Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit" Conference (SICHERHEIT '10), pages 61–72, Berlin, 5–7 October 2010. (BibTeX)

WRAITS 2008

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Hans P. Reiser. Efficient State Transfer for Hypervisor-Based Proactive Recovery. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems (WRAITS '08), pages 7–12, Glasgow, 1 April 2008. (BibTeX)

The goal of the project is to develop a Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery (FOREVER) service. This service can be used to enhance the resilience of replicated systems, namely those that can be affected by malicious attacks. FOREVER addresses three of the research gaps identified in ReSIST D13 deliverable, namely: evolution of threats, dependability cases, and diversity for security. In order to achieve the project goal, the work will be divided into three main tasks: (1) definition of the FOREVER service architecture, (2) analysis of how diversity can be managed, and (3) evaluation of the FOREVER service and development of a dependability case.

The FOREVER project was funded for 1 year by the European Union through the ReSIST Network of Excellence (IST-4-026764-NOE).

For more information, please visit the project's Web page.

Selected Publications

Middleware 2008
(Poster)

Alysson Bessani, Hans P. Reiser, Paulo Sousa, Ilir Gashi, Vladimir Stankovic, Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Alessandro Daidone, and Rafael Obelheiro. FOREVER: Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery. In Proceedings of the Middleware 2008 Conference Companion (Middleware '08), pages 99–101, Leuven, 3–5 December 2008. (BibTeX)

WRAITS 2008

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Hans P. Reiser. Efficient State Transfer for Hypervisor-Based Proactive Recovery. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems (WRAITS '08), pages 7–12, Glasgow, 1 April 2008. (BibTeX)

Professional Activities

DSN 2025

Program Committee of the 55th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '25)

EuroSys 2025 Program Committee of the 20th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '25)
Middleware 2025 Program Committee of the 26th Middleware Conference (Middleware '25)
ICDCS 2025

Program Committee of the 45th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '25)

DepWeb3 2025

Program Committee of the Dependable and Secure Web3 Blockchain and Smart Contracts Workshop (DepWeb3 '25), co-located with the 20th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '25)

Middleware 2024 Program Committee of the 25th Middleware Conference (Middleware '24)
ARES 2024 Program Committee of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES '24)
ROBUST 2024 Local Organizer of the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24)
OPODIS 2023 Program Committee of the 27th Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS '23)
Middleware 2023 Program Committee of the 24th Middleware Conference (Middleware '23)
ARES 2023 Program Committee of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES '23)
DSN 2021

Program Committee of the 51st International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '21)

Middleware 2021 Program Committee of the 22nd Middleware Conference (Middleware '21)
ARES 2021

External Reviewer for the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES '21)

Middleware 2020

ARM 2019

Program Committee of the 18th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM '19), co-located with the 20th Middleware Conference (Middleware '19)

RTAS 2019

Program Committee of the 25th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '19)

CrossCloud 2019

Program Committee of the 6th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud '19), co-located with the 19th International Symposium in Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid '19)

BCRB 2018

Co-Chair of the 1st Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB '18), co-located with the 48th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '18)

BlockSEA 2018

Program Committee of the 1st Workshop on Blockchain and Sharing Economy Applications (BlockSEA '18), co-located with the 18th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM '18)

CrossCloud 2018

Program Committee of the 5th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud '18), co-located with the 13th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '18)

ProWeb 2018

Program Committee of the 2nd Workshop on Programming Technology for the Future Web (ProWeb '18), co-located with the 2nd International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (<Programming> '18)

ARM 2017

Program Committee of the 16th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM '17), co-located with the 18th Middleware Conference (Middleware '17)

CrossCloud 2017

Program Committee of the 4th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud '17), co-located with the 12th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '17)

ProWeb 2017

Program Committee of the 1st Workshop on Programming Technology for the Future Web (ProWeb '17), co-located with the 1st International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (<Programming> '17)

ARM 2016

Program Committee of the 15th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM '16), co-located with the 17th Middleware Conference (Middleware '16)

PaPoC 2016

Program Committee of the 2nd Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '16), co-located with the 11th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '16)

CrossCloud 2016

Program Committee of the 3rd Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud '16), co-located with the 11th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '16)

CrossCloud Brokers 2014

Program Committee of the 2nd Workshop on CrossCloud Systems (CrossCloud Brokers '14), co-located with the 13th Middleware Conference (Middleware '14)

USENIX ATC 2012

External Reviewer for the 2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '12)

EuroSys 2012

Shadow Program Committee of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '12)

ACM DLT Reviewer for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice (ACM DLT)
IEEE TC Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Computers (IEEE TC)
IEEE TCC Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (IEEE TCC)
IEEE T-IFS Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (IEEE T-IFS)
IEEE TDSC Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC)
IEEE TNSE Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (IEEE TNSE)
IEEE TPDS Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS)
IEEE IoTJ Reviewer for IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IEEE IoTJ)
KUIN Reviewer for KI – Künstliche Intelligenz (KUIN)

Teaching [with Evaluation Scores]

Summer Term Winter Term
2024 VS-L [1.20] AKSS [1.31] VS-E [1.30] MWCC-L MWCC-E
2023 VS-L [1.15] Top 2 VS-E [1.32] Top 2 MWCC-L [1.33] MWCC-E [1.44]
2022 VS-L [1.15] Top 3 VS-E [1.13] Top 1 MWCC-L [1.10] Top 3 MWCC-E [1.30]
2021 VS-L [1.11] VS-E [1.17] MWCC-L [1.14] MWCC-E [1.25]
2020 MWCC-L [1.20] MWCC-E [1.27]
2019 VS-L [1.30] VS-E [1.43] MWCC-L [1.01] Top 1 MWCC-E [1.37]
2018 VS-L [1.18] VS-E [1.40] MWCC-L [1.16] Top 3 AKSS [1.06] MWCC-E [1.61]
2017 VS-L [1.18] Top 3 VS-E [1.24] Top 3 MWCC-L [1.29] MWCC-E [1.35]
2016 VS-L [1.53] VS-E [1.50] MWCC-L [1.25] MWCC-E [1.40]
2015 VS-E [1.63] MWCC-L [1.23] MWCC-E [1.36]
2014 VS-E [1.37] Top 3 MWCC-L [1.19] Top 3 MWCC-E [1.36]
2013 VS-E [1.51] MWCC-L [1.25] MWCC-E [1.41]
2012 VS-E [1.37] MWCC-L [1.51] MWCC-E [1.64]
2011 VS-E [1.20] Top 2 MWCC-E [1.49]
2010 AKSS [1.32] VS-E [1.38] MWCC-E [1.57]
2009 VS-E [2.15] MW-E [1.05]
2008 VS-E [2.24] MW-E [2.01]
VS-L Distributed Systems Lecture MWCC-L Middleware – Cloud Computing Lecture
VS-E Distributed Systems Exercises MWCC-E Middleware – Cloud Computing Exercises
AKSS System Software Seminar MW-E Middleware Exercises

Publications

Middleware 2024

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Targeting Tail Latency in Replicated Systems with Proactive Rejection. In Proceedings of the 25th Middleware Conference (Middleware '24), Hong Kong, 2–6 December 2024. (BibTeX, Artifact, Source code)

PODC 2024
SIGACT Research Highlights Nomination

Diogo Avelãs, Hasan Heydari, Eduardo Alchieri, Tobias Distler, Alysson Bessani. Probabilistic Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 43rd Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '24), Nantes, 17–21 June 2024. (BibTeX, Extended version)

CoRR 2024

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Spider: A BFT Architecture for Geo-Replicated Cloud Services. In Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 18 May 2024. (BibTeX)

RTAS 2024

Harald Böhm, Tobias Distler, and Peter Wägemann. TinyBFT: Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '24), pages 225–238, Hong Kong, 13–16 May 2024. (BibTeX, Source code)

ROBUST 2024

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Tough on the Outside, Reliable on the Inside: Utilizing System Composition for Improved Resilience. Presented at the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24), 13–14 March 2024.

Harald Böhm and Tobias Distler. Memory-Efficient Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Systems. Presented at the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24), 13–14 March 2024.

CoRR 2023

Alysson Bessani, Miguel Correia, Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo, Jiangshan Yu. Vivisecting the Dissection: On the Role of Trusted Components in BFT Protocols. In Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 10 December 2023. (BibTeX)

DSN 2023

Tobias Distler, Michael Eischer, and Laura Lawniczak. Micro Replication. In Proceedings of the 53rd International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '23), pages 123–137, Porto, 27–30 June 2023. (BibTeX, Specification and source code)

PaPoC 2023

Laura Lawniczak, Marco Ammon, and Tobias Distler. Generic Checkpointing Support for Stream-based State-Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '23), Rome, 8 May 2023. (BibTeX)

PRDC 2021

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Egalitarian Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 26th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC '21), Perth, 1–4 December 2021. (BibTeX, Extended version)

EDCC 2021

Laura Lawniczak and Tobias Distler. Stream-based State Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 17th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '21), pages 119–126, Munich, 13–16 September 2021. (BibTeX, Extended version, Source code)

CSUR 2021

Tobias Distler. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant State-Machine Replication from a Systems Perspective. In ACM Computing Surveys, 54(1):24:1–38, 2021. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2020
Best Student Paper

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Resilient Cloud-based Replication with Low Latency. In Proceedings of the 21st Middleware Conference (Middleware '20), pages 14–28, Delft, 7–11 December 2020. (BibTeX, Extended version)

PaPoC 2020

Michael Eischer, Benedikt Straßner, and Tobias Distler. Low-Latency Geo-Replicated State Machines with Guaranteed Writes. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '20), Heraklion, 27 April 2020. (BibTeX)

FB-SYS 2019

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Efficient Checkpointing in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems. In Tagungsband des FB-SYS Herbsttreffens 2019 (FB-SYS '19), Osnabrück, 21–22 November 2019. (BibTeX)

SRDS 2019

Michael Eischer, Markus Büttner, and Tobias Distler. Deterministic Fuzzy Checkpoints. In Proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS '19), pages 153–162, Lyon, 1–4 October 2019. (BibTeX)

PaPoC 2019

Christian Deyerl and Tobias Distler. In Search of a Scalable Raft-based Replication Architecture. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '19), pages 1–7, Dresden, 25 March 2019. (BibTeX)

Computing 2019

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Scalable Byzantine Fault-tolerant State-Machine Replication on Heterogeneous Servers. Computing, 101(2):97–118, 2019. (BibTeX)

DSN 2018

Bijun Li, Nico Weichbrodt, Johannes Behl, Pierre-Louis Aublin, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Troxy: Transparent Access to Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems. In Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '18), pages 59–70, Luxembourg City, 25–28 June 2018. (BibTeX)

BCRB 2018

Alysson Bessani, Hans P. Reiser, Marko Vukolić, and Tobias Distler. Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB '18). In Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops (DSN-W '18), page 121, Luxembourg City, 25 June 2018. (BibTeX)

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Latency-Aware Leader Selection for Geo-Replicated Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB '18), pages 140–145, Luxembourg City, 25 June 2018. (BibTeX)

EDCC 2017

Michael Eischer and Tobias Distler. Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance on Heterogeneous Servers. In Proceedings of the 13th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '17), pages 34–41, Geneva, 4–8 September 2017. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2017

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Hybrids on Steroids: SGX-based High Performance BFT. In Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '17), pages 222–237, Belgrade, 23–26 April 2017. (BibTeX)

Technical Report

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Hybster – A Highly Parallelizable Protocol for Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Service Replication. Technical report 64440. TU Braunschweig, 2017. (BibTeX)

IEEE TC 2016

Tobias Distler, Christian Cachin, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Resource-efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In IEEE Transactions on Computers, 65(9):2807–2819, 2016. (BibTeX)

EDCC 2016

Bijun Li, Wenbo Xu, Muhammad Zeeshan Abid, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. SAREK: Optimistic Parallel Ordering in Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 12th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '16), pages 77–88, Gothenburg, 5–9 September 2016. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2015

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Consensus-Oriented Parallelization: How to Earn Your First Million. In Proceedings of the 16th Middleware Conference (Middleware '15), pages 173–184, Vancouver, 7–11 December 2015. (BibTeX)

ARM 2015

Christopher Eibel and Tobias Distler. Towards Energy-Proportional State-Machine Replication. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM '15), pages 19–24, Vancouver, 8 December 2015. (BibTeX)

HotDep 2014

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Scalable BFT for Multi-Cores: Actor-based Decomposition and Consensus-oriented Parallelization. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep '14), pages 49–54, Broomfield, 5 October 2014. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2012

Rüdiger Kapitza, Johannes Behl, Christian Cachin, Tobias Distler, Simon Kuhnle, Seyed Vahid Mohammadi, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Klaus Stengel. CheapBFT: Resource-efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '12), pages 295–308, Bern, 10–13 April 2012. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2011

Tobias Distler and Rüdiger Kapitza. Increasing Performance in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems with On-Demand Replica Consistency. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '11), pages 91–105, Salzburg, 10–13 April 2011. (BibTeX)

NDSS 2011

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Ivan Popov, Hans P. Reiser, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. SPARE: Replicas on Hold. In Proceedings of the 18th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '11), pages 407–420, San Diego, 6–9 February 2011. (BibTeX)

SICHERHEIT 2010

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Hans P. Reiser. State Transfer for Hypervisor-Based Proactive Recovery of Heterogeneous Replicated Services. In Proceedings of the 5th "Sicherheit, Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit" Conference (SICHERHEIT '10), pages 61–72, Berlin, 5–7 October 2010. (BibTeX)

BFTW3 2009

Rüdiger Kapitza, Tobias Distler, and Hans P. Reiser. Practical Intrusion-tolerance in the Cloud. Presented at the Workshop on Theory and Practice of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFTW3 '09), Elche, 22 September 2009.

MAI 2009

Hans P. Reiser, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. Functional Decomposition and Interactions in Hybrid Intrusion-tolerant Systems. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Middleware-Application Interaction (MAI '09), pages 7–12, Lisbon, 12 June 2009. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2008
(Poster)

Alysson Bessani, Hans P. Reiser, Paulo Sousa, Ilir Gashi, Vladimir Stankovic, Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, Alessandro Daidone, and Rafael Obelheiro. FOREVER: Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery. In Proceedings of the Middleware 2008 Conference Companion (Middleware '08), pages 99–101, Leuven, 3–5 December 2008. (BibTeX)

WRAITS 2008

Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Hans P. Reiser. Efficient State Transfer for Hypervisor-Based Proactive Recovery. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems (WRAITS '08), pages 7–12, Glasgow, 1 April 2008. (BibTeX)

DAIS 2018
Best Paper

Christopher Eibel, Christian Gulden, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, and Tobias Distler. Strome: Energy-Aware Data-Stream Processing. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS '18), pages 40–57, Madrid, 18–20 June 2018. (BibTeX)

IC2E 2018

Christopher Eibel, Thao-Nguyen Do, Robert Meißner, and Tobias Distler. Empya: Saving Energy in the Face of Varying Workloads. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E '18), pages 134–140, Orlando, 17–20 April 2018. (BibTeX)

Technical Report

Christopher Eibel, Thao-Nguyen Do, Robert Meißner, and Tobias Distler. Empya: An Energy-aware Middleware Platform for Dynamic Applications. Technical Report CS-2018-01, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), 2018. (BibTeX)

DSN 2017

Rainer Schiekofer, Johannes Behl, and Tobias Distler. Agora: A Dependable High-Performance Coordination Service for Multi-Cores. In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '17), pages 333–344, Denver, 26–29 June 2017. (BibTeX)

EuroSys 2015

Tobias Distler, Christopher Bahn, Alysson Bessani, Frank Fischer, and Flavio Junqueira. Extensible Distributed Coordination. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15), pages 143–158, Bordeaux, 21–24 April 2015. (BibTeX)

SDMCMM 2012

Tobias Distler, Frank Fischer, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Siqi Ling. Enhancing Coordination in Cloud Infrastructures with an Extendable Coordination Service. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Secure and Dependable Middleware for Cloud Monitoring and Management (SDMCMM '12), pages 1–6, Montreal, 4 December 2012. (BibTeX)

SSS 2012

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. DQMP: A Decentralized Protocol to Enforce Global Quotas in Cloud Environments. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS '12), pages 217–231, Toronto, 1–4 October 2012. (BibTeX)

RTAS 2024

Harald Böhm, Tobias Distler, and Peter Wägemann. TinyBFT: Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '24), pages 225–238, Hong Kong, 13–16 May 2024. (BibTeX, Source code)

ROBUST 2024

Harald Böhm and Tobias Distler. Memory-Efficient Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication for Highly Resource-Constrained Systems. Presented at the 1st Workshop on Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication (ROBUST '24), 13–14 March 2024.

ECRTS 2018
Outstanding Paper

Peter Wägemann, Christian Dietrich, Tobias Distler, Peter Ulbrich, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Whole-System Worst-Case Energy-Consumption Analysis for Energy-Constrained Real-Time Systems. In Proceedings of the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS '18), pages 24:1–24:25, Barcelona, 3–6 July 2018. (BibTeX)

Peter Wägemann, Christian Dietrich, Tobias Distler, Peter Ulbrich, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Whole-system WCEC Analysis for Energy-Constrained Real-Time Systems (Artifact). Dagstuhl Artifacts Series, 4(2):7:1–7:4, 2018. (BibTeX)

WCET 2018

Christian Eichler, Tobias Distler, Peter Ulbrich, Peter Wägemann, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. TASKers: A Whole-System Generator for Benchmarking Real-Time-System Analyses. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis (WCET '18), pages 6:1–6:12, Barcelona, 3 July 2018. (BibTeX)

ACM TECS 2017

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Heiko Janker, Phillip Raffeck, Volkmar Sieh, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Operating Energy-Neutral Real-Time Systems. In ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 17(1):11:1–11:25, 2017. (BibTeX)

RTAS 2017

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Christian Eichler, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Benchmark Generation for Timing Analysis. In Proceedings of the 23rd Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '17), pages 319–330, Pittsburgh, 18–21 April 2017. (BibTeX)

Christian Eichler, Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Demo Abstract: Tooling Support for Benchmarking Timing Analysis. In Proceedings of the 23rd Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '17), pages 159–160, Pittsburgh, 18 April 2017. (BibTeX)

RTSS 2016
(Work in Progress)

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Phillip Raffeck, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Poster Abstract: Towards Code Metrics for Benchmarking Timing Analysis. In Proceedings of the 37th Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS '16), page 369, Porto, 29 November – 2 December 2016. (BibTeX)

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Phillip Raffeck, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Towards Code Metrics for Benchmarking Timing Analysis. In Proceedings of the 37th Real-Time Systems Symposium Work-in-Progress Session (RTSS WiP '16), Porto, 30 November 2016. (BibTeX)

RTAS 2016

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Heiko Janker, Phillip Raffeck, and Volkmar Sieh. A Kernel for Energy-Neutral Real-Time Systems with Mixed Criticalities. In Proceedings of the 22nd Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '16), pages 25–36, Vienna, 11–14 April 2016. (BibTeX)

ECRTS 2015

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Timo Hönig, Heiko Janker, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. Worst-Case Energy Consumption Analysis for Energy-Constrained Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 27th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS '15), pages 105–114, Lund, 7–10 July 2015. (BibTeX)

WCET 2015

Peter Wägemann, Tobias Distler, Timo Hönig, Volkmar Sieh, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat. GenE: A Benchmark Generator for WCET Analysis. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis (WCET '15), pages 31–40, Lund, 7 July 2015. (BibTeX)

Habilitation

Tobias Distler. Resource-Aware System Software for Replicated Services. Habilitation, 2021. (BibTeX, Paper version)

Dissertation

Tobias Distler. Resource-efficient Fault and Intrusion Tolerance. Dissertation, 2014. (BibTeX)

GIDiss 2014

Tobias Distler. Ressourceneffiziente Fehler- und Einbruchstoleranz. Summary of the dissertation (in German). In Ausgezeichnete Informatikdissertationen 2014, pages 71–80, 2015. Presented at the Kolloquium zum GI-Dissertationspreis 2014, Dagstuhl, 10–13 May 2015. (BibTeX)

Middleware 2020

Tobias Distler. Report from the Artifact Evaluation Chair. In Proceedings of the 21st Middleware Conference (Middleware '20), Delft, 7–11 December 2020. (BibTeX)

CloudCP 2012

Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, Florian Heisig, Rüdiger Kapitza, Matthias Schunter. Providing Fault-tolerant Execution of Web-Service-based Workflows within Clouds. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms (CloudCP '12), pages 39–44, Bern, 10 April 2012. (BibTeX)

HotDep 2010

Rüdiger Kapitza, Matthias Schunter, Christian Cachin, Klaus Stengel, and Tobias Distler. Storyboard: Optimistic Deterministic Multithreading. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep '10), pages 1–6, Vancouver, 3 October 2010. (BibTeX)