Targeted attacks against network infrastructure are notoriously difficult to guard against. In the case of communication networks, such attacks can leave users vulnerable to censorship and surveillance, even when cryptography is used. Much of the existing work on network fault-tolerance focuses on random faults and does not apply to adversarial faults (attacks). Centralized networks have single points of failure by definition, leading to a growing popularity in decentralized architectures and protocols for greater fault-tolerance. However, centralized network structure can arise even when protocols are decentralized. Despite their decentralized protocols, the Internet and World-Wide Web have been shown both theoretically and historically to be highly susceptible to attack, in part due to emergent structural centralization. When single points of failure exist, they are potentially vulnerable to non-technological (i.e., coercive) attacks, suggesting the importance of a structural approach to attack-tolerance. We show how the assumption of partial trust transitivity, while more realistic than the assumption underlying webs of trust, can be used to quantify the effective redundancy of a network as a function of trust transitivity. We also prove that the effective redundancy of the wrap-around butterfly topology increases exponentially with trust transitivity and describe a novel concurrent multipath routing algorithm for constructing paths to utilize that redundancy. When portions of network structure can be dictated our results can be used to create scalable, attack-tolerant infrastructures. More generally, our results provide a theoretical formalism for evaluating the effects of network structure on adversarial fault-tolerance.
Our proposed routing algorithm makes use of a structured network , in which link structure is predetermined. Structured networks have been a popular tool in parallel processing architectures @cite_8 . More recently, peer-to-peer systems based on distributed hash tables have used structured overlay networks to map table keys to local TCP IP routes @cite_34 @cite_32 . Such networks can be designed to have favorable structural and routing properties, which can be used to to improve attack-tolerance.
@cite_34 @cite_32 @cite_8
1992467531 2171957559 2484626270 2109679596
We consider the problem of designing an overlay network and routing mechanism that permits finding resources efficiently in a peer-to-peer system. We argue that many existing approaches to this problem can be modeled as the construction of a random graph embedded in a metric space whose points represent resource identifiers, where the probability of a connection between two nodes depends only on the distance between them in the metric space. We study the performance of a peer-to-peer system where nodes are embedded at grid points in a simple metric space: a one-dimensional real line. We prove upper and lower bounds on the message complexity of locating particular resources in such a system, under a variety of assumptions about failures of either nodes or the connections between them. Our lower bounds in particular show that the use of inverse power-law distributions in routing, as suggested by Kleinberg [5], is close to optimal. We also give heuristics to efficiently maintain a network supporting efficient routing as nodes enter and leave the system. Finally, we give some experimental results that suggest promising directions for future work. Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks provide a substrate for the construction of large-scale, decentralized applications, including distributed storage, group communication, and content distribution. These overlays are highly resilient; they can route messages correctly even when a large fraction of the nodes crash or the network partitions. But current overlays are not secure; even a small fraction of malicious nodes can prevent correct message delivery throughout the overlay. This problem is particularly serious in open peer-to-peer systems, where many diverse, autonomous parties without preexisting trust relationships wish to pool their resources. This paper studies attacks aimed at preventing correct message delivery in structured peer-to-peer overlays and presents defenses to these attacks. We describe and evaluate techniques that allow nodes to join the overlay, to maintain routing state, and to forward messages securely in the presence of malicious nodes. The field of structured P2P systems has seen fast growth upon the introduction of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) in the early 2000s. The first proposals, including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, were gradually improved to cope with scalability, locality and security issues. By utilizing the processing and bandwidth resources of end users, the P2P approach enables high performance of data distribution which is hard to achieve with traditional client-server architectures. The P2P computing community is also being actively utilized for software updates to the Internet, P2PSIP VoIP, video-on-demand, and distributed backups. The recent introduction of the identifier-locator split proposal for future Internet architectures poses another important application for DHTs, namely mapping between host permanent identity and changing IP address. The growing complexity and scale of modern P2P systems requires the introduction of hierarchy and intelligence in routing of requests. Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems covers fundamental issues in organization, optimization, and tradeoffs of present large-scale structured P2P systems, as well as, provides principles, analytical models, and simulation methods applicable in designing future systems. Part I presents the state-of-the-art of structured P2P systems, popular DHT topologies and protocols, and the design challenges for efficient P2P network topology organization, routing, scalability, and security. Part II shows that local strategies with limited knowledge per peer provide the highest scalability level subject to reasonable performance and security constraints. Although the strategies are local, their efficiency is due to elements of hierarchical organization, which appear in many DHT designs that traditionally are considered as flat ones. Part III describes methods to gradually enhance the local view limit when a peer is capable to operate with larger knowledge, still partial, about the entire system. These methods were formed in the evolution of hierarchical organization from flat DHT networks to hierarchical DHT architectures, look-ahead routing, and topology-aware ranking. Part IV highlights some known P2P-based experimental systems and commercial applications in the modern Internet. The discussion clarifies the importance of P2P technology for building present and future Internet systems. There has been extensive work on network architectures that support multi-path routing to improve performance in wireless mesh networks. However, previous work uses ad-hoc design principles that cannot guarantee any network-wide performance objectives such as conjointly maximizing resource utilization and improving fairness. In parallel, numerous theoretical results have addressed the issue of optimizing a combined metric of network utilization and fairness using techniques based on back-pressure scheduling, routing and flow control. However, the proposed theoretical algorithms are extremely difficult to implement in practice, especially in the presence of the 802.11 MAC and TCP. We propose Horizon, a novel system design for multi-path forwarding in wireless meshes, based on the theoretical results on back-pressure. Our design works with an unmodified TCP stack and on top of the existing 802.11 MAC. We modified the back-pressure approach to obtain a simple 802.11-compatible packet-forwarding heuristic and a novel, light-weight path estimator, while maintaining global optimality properties. We propose a delayed reordering algorithm that eliminates TCP timeouts while keeping TCP packet reordering to a minimum. We have evaluated our implementation on a 22-node testbed. We have shown that Horizon effectively utilizes available resources (disjoint paths). In contrast to previous work, our design not only avoids bottlenecks but also optimally load-balances traffic across them when needed, improving fairness among competing flows. To our knowledge, Horizon is the first practical wireless system based on back-pressure.