A Testbed-based Visualization of Misbehavior in Peer-to-Peer Systems

The Pastry [2] Distributed Hastable (DHT) provides decentralized peer-to-peer services in a scalable and efficient manor. Peers do not have to provide links to each node in the network, but only to a small subset of nodes. Due to this, lookup requests for services offered in the peer-to-peer system mostly can not be sent to the destination directly, but have to be forwarded to a node that is logically located closer to the destination regarding the structure of the Peer-to-Peer overlay. This intermediate node again forwards the lookup request to an intermediate node closer to destination, unless the destination is reached. Even though this approach reduces the routing table size and, therefore, the overhead, each intermediate node has to behave benign. Yet, this can not be assumed in a realistic scenario. Therefore, mechanisms are required to increase the robustness of the routing algorithms. To visualize the impact of misbehavior in Pastry, we introduce a tool that provides a graphical representation of the peer-to-peer structure of the overlay network and the routing behavior of benign and malicious nodes. By now, we implemented the Incorrect Lookup Routing attack and the Redundant Routing algorithm as countermeasure for this attack. Yet, further attacks and countermeasures can be implemented easily.