Exploiting Trust in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Second generation peer-to-peer systems [5, 6] have shown a lot of promise with many desirable properties such as scalability, self-configuration, automatic load balancing etc. However the open nature of these systems also makes them vulnerable to Byzantine attacks. These systems are designed to be fault tolerant in the presence of a few malicious nodes. We however believe that even a handful of evil nodes could disrupt the system by exploiting certain weaknesses that we have identified. In these systems, a single maclicious node, can present multiple identities to the system. This allows them to emulate multiple nodes simultaneously and also allows them limited control of their placement in overlay networks[4, 7] that are integral to the system. We devised attacks based on these weaknesses to disrupt lookup and storage operations in the peer-to-peer storage systems, CFS[5] and PAST[6]. We show that it is possible to exploit these weaknesses to attack these systems and have evaluated the feasibility of these attacks.