SecureCyclon: Dependable Peer Sampling

TL;DR

SecureCyclon is a novel peer-sampling protocol that guarantees the complete exclusion of malicious nodes from peer-to-peer overlays, enhancing network dependability and security.

Contribution

It introduces a deterministic method to eliminate malicious nodes from peer-sampling, a significant advancement over previous probabilistic approaches.

Findings

Resilience up to 40% malicious nodes demonstrated.

First protocol to fully exclude malicious nodes from peer sampling.

Extended simulations validate effectiveness and robustness.

Abstract

Overlay management is the cornerstone of building robust and dependable Peer-to-Peer systems. A key component for building such overlays is the peer-sampling service, a mechanism that continuously supplies each node with a set of up-to-date peers randomly selected across all alive nodes. Arguably, the most pernicious malicious action against such mechanisms is the provision of arbitrarily created links that point at malicious nodes. This paper proposes SecureCyclon, a peer-sampling protocol that deterministically eliminates the ability of malicious nodes to overrepresent themselves in Peer-to-Peer overlays. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first protocol to offer this property, as previous works were able to only bound the proportion of excessive links to malicious nodes, without completely eliminating them. SecureCyclon redefines the concept of node descriptors from just being containers of information that enable communication with specific nodes, to being communication certificates that traverse the network and enable nodes to provably discover malicious nodes. We evaluate our solution with the conduction of extended simulations, and we demonstrate that it provides resilience even at the extreme condition of 40% malicious node participation.