A Taxonomy of Rational Attacks

Abstract

Abstract-For peer-to-peer services to be effective, participating nodes must cooperate, but in most scenarios a node represents a self-interested party and cooperation can neither be expected nor enforced. A reasonable assumption is that a large fraction of p2p nodes are rational and will attempt to maximize their consumption of system resources while minimizing the use of their own. If such behavior violates system policy then it constitutes an attack. In this paper we identify and create a taxonomy for rational attacks and then identify corresponding solutions if they exist. The most effective solutions directly incentivize cooperative behavior, but when this is not feasible the common alternative is to incentivize evidence of cooperation instead.

The Impact of User Rationality in Federated Clouds

“…There are many examples of rational user behavior in the literature, such as the free-riding phenomena in file-sharing peer-to-peer networks, where rational users affect the overall system performance by consuming more than their fair share [16]; increased waiting times in computational grids, when rational users compete for the same resources [26]; and rational users achieving higher rankings in the SETI@home project statistics, by modifying the project's software client to report false-negatives [16].…”

Secure Peer Sampling Service: The Mosquito Attack

“…Surprisingly, this weak integrity constraint can be found, for example, in real-world file-sharing application [11,13], where peers do not verify the validity of item advertisement they receive.…”

“…Intuitively, since the network should be random, detecting a peer showing a popularity value too distant from the average means that it could represent a network hub. Each peer builds its own knowledge about its surroundings and it does not share this information with its neighbors [13] to avoid further issues, such as the corruption of the exchanged knowledge. Dilemma mechanism: Figure 1 shows the prestige-based SPS algorithm written in pseudo-code.…”

PSH: A Private and Shared History-Based Incentive Mechanism

“…Load balancing, robustness, scalability, and fault tolerance are properties that a P2P system can offer. However, challenges in P2P systems include freeriders [1], malicious peers, Sybil attacks [6], self-interest [17], and other forms of attacks [15]. Incentive mechanisms are used to address those challenges and encourage peers to act cooperatively.…”