Patterns for building dependable systems with trusted bases

Abstract

We propose a set of patterns for structuring a system to be dependable by design. The key idea is to localize the system's most critical requirements into small, reliable parts called trusted bases. We describe two instances of trusted bases: (1) the end-to-end check, which localizes the correctness checking of a computation to end points of a system, and (2) the trusted kernel, which ensures the safety of a set of resources with a small core of a system.