Veracity: a fully decentralized service for securing network coordinate systems

Decentralized logical coordinate systems have been proposed as a means of estimating network distances. These systems have widespread usage in p2p networks, ranging from neighbor selection to replica placement. Unfortunately, these systems are vulnerable to even a small number of malicious nodes lying about their coordinates or measurements. In this paper, we introduce Veracity, a fully decentralized service for securing network coordinate systems. Unlike prior proposals, Veracity requires neither the presence of a large number of a priori trusted nodes nor the use of network triangle inequality testing. Veracity utilizes a vote-based approach, where all advertised coordinates are independently verified by a minimal set of nodes before being used. Via detailed simulations in p2psim, we demonstrate that Veracity mitigates a variety of known attacks against Vivaldi for moderate sizes of malicious nodes, incurring acceptable communication overhead, and in some cases, even reducing the convergence time of the coordi-