A Testbed-based Analysis of the Incorrect Lookup Routing Attack on the Pastry DHT

Distributed Hashtables (DHT), with Pastry [2] as a prominent representative, are one of the most recent peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures. DHTs scale well to the network size due to a small routing table and a hierarchical routing scheme. In Pastry, the number of routing entries scales logarithmically with respect to the number of participating nodes, because each node maintains route entries to only a few nodes per hierarchical (sub) domain. Therefore, routing requests have to be be forwarded by intermediate nodes to the final destination. In order to route successfully, each node has to behave benignly according to the protocol specifications. The Incorrect Lookup Routing attack [4] misuses this routing scheme to launch a denial of service attack on the P2P network. While this kind of routing attack was extensively analyzed theoretically and by simulations, to the best of our knowledge, testbed based evaluations have not been performed to date. Such an evaluation may reveal unnoticed influences or (at least) verifies the impact of malicious nodes on a P2P network. Therefore, a testbed evaluation of the Incorrect Lookup Routing attack is presented in this paper.