Patent ID: 7613774

Claim:
A method for approving a response or a decision of an observed node in a distributed system, comprising: generating the response to a request from a target node by the observed node; forwarding the response from the observed node to at least one of a plurality of chaperone nodes associated with the observed node based on a chaperone scheme, wherein the chaperone scheme comprises a per-observed node scheme; and approving the response by the plurality of chaperone nodes using a chaperone voting policy and a chaperone approval policy to obtain an approved response, forwarding the approved response to the target node; wherein the distributed system implements an overlay network for message delivery, wherein the observed node and the plurality of chaperone nodes communicate using the overlay network, and wherein the per-observed node scheme comprises selecting the at least one of the plurality of chaperone nodes associated with the observed node using a global unique identifier (GUID) assigned to the observed node.