Secure forwarding in DHTs - Is redundancy the key to robustness?

Abstract

The provisioning of techniques for secure message forwarding over Distributed Hash Tables has been a research concern for a long time. Several techniques have been developed and evaluated, but typically each based on the increase of redundancy as a defense against data forwarding attacks. Although the security vigor of these solutions, they have left the scalability aspect largely unaddressed, as the weak peers may not support the congestion caused by the increase on redundancy. In this article, we take the opposite tack and discuss why improving the quality of delivery paths can achieve a resilience comparable to redundant routing. To prove our intuition, we confront the two strategies and develop a representative algorithm of each category. Further, we validate our work using two other existing protocols that increase redundancy (more independent paths) to fortify routing. Our results reveal that improving the quality of paths can be as effective as increasing redundancy but with minimum overhead. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.