Secure Routing for Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

Authors

Miguel Castro
Peter Druschel
Ayalvadi Ganesh
Antony Rowstron
Dan S. Wallach

Abstract

Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks provide a substrate for the construction of large-scale, decentralized applications, including distributed storage, group communication, and content distribution. These overlays are highly resilient; they can route messages correctly even when a large fraction of the nodes crash or the network partitions. But current overlays are not secure; even a small fraction of malicious nodes can prevent correct message delivery throughout the overlay. This problem is particularly serious in open peer-to-peer systems, where many diverse, autonomous parties without pre-existing trust relationships wish to pool their resources. This paper studies attacks aimed at preventing correct message delivery in structured peer-to-peer overlays and presents defenses to these attacks. We describe and evaluate techniques that allow nodes to join the overlay, to maintain routing state, and to forward messages securely in the presence of malicious nodes.

Published

Proceedings of the 5th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, Massachusetts, December 2002.

Text

PostScript (664 kbytes)
PDF (271 kbytes)