Sybil-resistant DHT routing

Abstract

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are very efficient distributed systems for routing, but at the same time vulnerable to disruptive nodes. Designers of such systems want them used in open networks, where an adversary can perform a sybil attack by introducing a large number of corrupt nodes in the network, considerably degrading its performance. We introduce a routing strategy that alleviates some of the effects of such an attack by making sure that lookups are performed using a diverse set of nodes. This ensures that at least some of the nodes queried are good, and hence the search makes forward progress. This strategy makes use of latent social information present in the introduction graph of the network. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.