Preserving Peer Replicas By Rate-Limited Sampled Voting in LOCKSS

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel voting protocol for peer-to-peer archival systems like LOCKSS, incorporating rate limiting and intrusion detection to enhance resilience against long-term adversarial attacks.

Contribution

It presents a new protocol design with simulations that improve damage detection and prevention in distributed web preservation systems.

Findings

Protocol effectively limits damage from adversaries

Simulations show high detection probability of attacks

Enhanced resilience in long-term web archiving

Abstract

The LOCKSS project has developed and deployed in a world-wide test a peer-to-peer system for preserving access to journals and other archival information published on the Web. It consists of a large number of independent, low-cost, persistent web caches that cooperate to detect and repair damage to their content by voting in "opinion polls." Based on this experience, we present a design for and simulations of a novel protocol for voting in systems of this kind. It incorporates rate limitation and intrusion detection to ensure that even some very powerful adversaries attacking over many years have only a small probability of causing irrecoverable damage before being detected.