Increasing Structured P2P Protocol Resilience to Localized Attacks

Abstract

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing model has been applied to many application fields over the last decade. P2P protocols made their way from infamous - and frequently illicit - file sharing applications towards serious applications, e.g., in entertainment, audio/video conferencing, or critical applications like smart grid, Car-2-Car communication, or Machine-to-Machine communication. Some of the reasons for that are P2P's decentralized design that inherently provides for fault tolerance to non-malicious faults. However, the base P2P scalability and decentralization requirements often result in design choices that negatively impact their robustness to varied security threats. A prominent vulnerability are Eclipse attacks (EA) that aim at information hiding and consequently perturb a P2P overlay's reliable service delivery. This dissertation provides the necessary background to understand the different types and inherent complexity of EAs, the susceptibility of many P2P protocols to EAs, and a mitigation technique for the localized EA variant. The applicability of the proposed mitigation technique has been validated experimentally and shows for a wide range of system parameters and application scenarios good mitigation rates reaching up to 100%