In peer-to-peer systems, attrition attacks include both traditional, network-level denial of service attacks as well as application-level attacks in which malign peers conspire to waste loyal peers' resources. We describe several defenses for LOCKSS, a peer-to-peer digital preservation system, that help ensure that application-level attacks even from powerful adversaries are less effective than simple network-level attacks, and that network-level attacks must be intense, wide-spread, and prolonged to impair the system.
Peer-to-peer (p2p) networking technologies have gained popularity as a mechanism for users to share files without the need for centralized servers. A p2p network provides a scalable and fault-tolerant mechanism to locate nodes anywhere on a network without maintaining a large amount of routing state. This allows for a variety of applications beyond simple file sharing. Examples include multicast systems, anonymous communications systems, and web caches. We survey security issues that occur in the underlying p2p routing protocols, as well as fairness and trust issues that occur in file sharing and other p2p applications.We discuss how techniques, ranging from cryptography, to random network probing, to economic incentives, can be used to address these problems. Peer-to-peer storage systems assume that their users consume resources in proportion to their contribution. Unfortunately, users are unlikely to do this without some enforcement mechanism. Prior solutions to this problem require centralized infrastructure, constraints on data placement, or ongoing administrative costs. All of these run counter to the design philosophy of peer-to-peer systems.Samsara enforces fairness in peer-to-peer storage systems without requiring trusted third parties, symmetric storage relationships, monetary payment, or certified identities. Each peer that requests storage of another must agree to hold a claim in return---a placeholder that accounts for available space. After an exchange, each partner checks the other to ensure faithfulness. Samsara punishes unresponsive nodes probabilistically. Because objects are replicated, nodes with transient failures are unlikely to suffer data loss, unlike those that are dishonest or chronically unavailable. Claim storage overhead can be reduced when necessary by forwarding among chains of nodes, and eliminated when cycles are created. Forwarding chains increase the risk of exposure to failure, but such risk is modest under reasonable assumptions of utilization and simultaneous, persistent failure. Computationally expensive tasks that can be parallelized are most efficiently completed by distributing the computation among a large number of processors. The growth of the Internet has made it possible to invite the participation of just about any computer in such distributed computations. This introduces the potential for cheating by untrusted participants. In a commercial setting where participants get paid for their contribution, there is incentive for dishonest participants to claim credit for work they did not do. In this paper, we propose security schemes that defend against this threat with very little overhead. Our weaker scheme discourages cheating by ensuring that it does not pay off, while our stronger schemes let participants prove that they have done most of the work they were assigned with high probability.