The Lotus-Eater Attack

TL;DR

The paper analyzes the Lotus-Eater attack in distributed systems where nodes cease service after certain thresholds, proposing techniques to limit damage assuming some nodes follow the protocol despite potential gaming.

Contribution

It introduces methods to mitigate damage from Lotus-Eater attacks in peer-to-peer systems, assuming some nodes adhere to the protocol.

Findings

Techniques can limit attack damage effectively.

Assumption that some nodes follow the protocol is crucial.

Analysis applies to systems like BitTorrent and scrip systems.

Abstract

Many protocols for distributed and peer-to-peer systems have the feature that nodes will stop providing service for others once they have received a certain amount of service. Examples include BitTorent's unchoking policy, BAR Gossip's balanced exchanges, and threshold strategies in scrip systems. An attacker can exploit this by providing service in a targeted way to prevent chosen nodes from providing service. While such attacks cannot be prevented, we discuss techniques that can be used to limit the damage they do. These techniques presume that a certain number of processes will follow the recommended protocol, even if they could do better by ``gaming'' the system.