Incentivizing Responsible Networking via Introduction-Based Routing

The Introduction-Based Routing Protocol (IBRP) leverages implicit trust relationships and per-node discretion to create incentives to avoid associating with misbehaving network participants. Nodes exercise discretion through their policies for offering or accepting introductions. We empirically demonstrate the robustness of IBRP against different attack scenarios. We also use empirical game-theoretic techniques to assess the strategic stability of compliant policies, and find preliminary evidence that IBRP encourages the adoption of policies that limit damage from misbehaving nodes. We argue that IBRP scales to Internet-sized networks, and can be deployed as an overlay on the current Internet, requiring no modifications to applications, operating systems or core network services, thus minimizing cost of adoption.