In recent decades, the RAFT distributed consensus algorithm has become a main pillar of the distributed systems ecosystem, ensuring data consistency and fault tolerance across multiple nodes. Although the fact that RAFT is well known for its simplicity, reliability, and efficiency, its security properties are not fully recognized, leaving implementations vulnerable to different kinds of attacks and threats, which can transform the RAFT harmony of consensus into a chaos of data inconsistency. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of the RAFT protocol, with a specific focus on its susceptibility to security threats such as message replay attacks and message forgery attacks. Examined how a malicious actor can exploit the protocol's message-passing mechanism to reintroduce old messages, disrupting the consensus process and leading to data inconsistency. The practical feasibility of these attacks is examined through simulated scenarios, and the key weaknesses in RAFT's design that enable them are identified. To address these vulnerabilities, a novel approach based on cryptography, authenticated message verification, and freshness check is proposed. This proposed solution provides a framework for enhancing the security of the RAFT implementations and guiding the development of more resilient distributed systems.

翻译：近几十年来，RAFT分布式共识算法已成为分布式系统生态的重要支柱，确保了多节点间的数据一致性与容错性。尽管RAFT以其简洁性、可靠性和高效性著称，但其安全特性尚未得到充分认识，导致实际部署易受各类攻击与威胁影响，可能使RAFT的共识和谐演变为数据不一致的混沌状态。本文对RAFT协议进行了系统性安全分析，重点关注其对消息重放攻击和消息伪造攻击等安全威胁的脆弱性。研究探讨了恶意攻击者如何利用协议的消息传递机制重新引入旧消息，从而破坏共识过程并导致数据不一致。通过模拟场景验证了这些攻击的实际可行性，并识别出RAFT设计中使其成为可能的关键缺陷。针对这些脆弱性，本文提出了一种基于密码学、认证消息验证和新鲜度检测的新方法。该方案为增强RAFT实现的安全性提供了框架，并为开发更具韧性的分布式系统提供了指导。