The byzantine empire in the intercloud

The relevance of Byzantine fault tolerance in the context of cloud computing has been questioned [3]. While arguments against Byzantine fault tolerance seemingly makes sense in the context of a single cloud, i.e., a large-scale cloud infrastructure that resides under control of a single, typically commercial provider, these arguments are less obvious in a broader context of the Intercloud, i.e., a cloud of multiple, independent clouds. In this paper, we start from commonly acknowledged issues that impede the adoption of Byzantine fault tolerance within a single cloud, and argue that many of these issues fade when Byzantine fault tolerance in the Intercloud is considered.