On Counteracting Byzantine Attacks in Network Coded Peer-to-Peer Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the vulnerability of network coded P2P systems to Byzantine attacks and introduces a signature scheme that effectively detects and contains such attacks at the packet level, improving bandwidth efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel signature scheme for Byzantine detection in network coding, enabling one-hop containment and superior bandwidth efficiency under high attack probabilities.

Findings

The probability of system failure increases significantly even with low attack probabilities.

The proposed signature scheme effectively detects contaminated packets at the source.

Our scheme outperforms other Byzantine detection methods in bandwidth efficiency when attacks are frequent.

Abstract

Random linear network coding can be used in peer-to-peer networks to increase the efficiency of content distribution and distributed storage. However, these systems are particularly susceptible to Byzantine attacks. We quantify the impact of Byzantine attacks on the coded system by evaluating the probability that a receiver node fails to correctly recover a file. We show that even for a small probability of attack, the system fails with overwhelming probability. We then propose a novel signature scheme that allows packet-level Byzantine detection. This scheme allows one-hop containment of the contamination, and saves bandwidth by allowing nodes to detect and drop the contaminated packets. We compare the net cost of our signature scheme with various other Byzantine schemes, and show that when the probability of Byzantine attacks is high, our scheme is the most bandwidth efficient.