Patent ID: 8640238

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, with a network node, a plurality of transaction requests from a plurality of network communication session with a plurality of clients; distributing a copy of each of the transaction requests to a plurality of virtual machines executing on the network node over a plurality of time steps to form a processing pipeline of the virtual machines; upon distributing a threshold number (n) of the transaction requests to the plurality of virtual machines, detecting whether any of the virtual machines in the processing pipeline has been compromised; when none of the virtual machines in the processing pipeline has been compromised, check-pointing the processing pipeline of virtual machines by recording a state for each of the plurality of virtual machines; when at least one of the virtual machines in the processing pipeline has been compromised, removing the compromised virtual machines from the processing pipeline; and reordering the processing pipeline by promoting the non-compromised virtual machines to earlier stages in the processing pipeline that correspond to stages associated with the removed virtual machines that have been compromised.