Assignment for Peer-to-Peer Seminar at TU Darmstadt
I received my assignment for the Peer-to-Peer Seminar at TU Darmstadt.
Security of P2P-based Incentive Schemes
In P2P systems, peers share resources which enable wide range of distributed services, e.g., file sharing like aMule and BitTotrrent. However, majority of nodes behave rationally (called: free-riders) and create tensions among each others. As a result, it effects collective welfare and quality-of-service of of P2P systems and applications. To tackle free-riding and improve overall quality of P2P systems, incentive mechanisms are used to punish free-riders and improve the collaborations of participating peers. Yet, these mechanisms are susceptible to attacks and mis-uses which need a considerable investigations.
The tasks of this seminar are: to describe the problem stated above and to survey potential strategies to misuse / attack incentive schemes of P2P systems. The student might focus on (but is not restricted to) three classes of attacks: (i) Denial of Service (DoS), (ii) ID-based, and (iii) Collusion-based attacks.
References:
Sepandar Kamvar et al., Incentives for Combatting Freeriding on P2P Networks
Seth Nielson et al., A Taxonomy of Rational Attacks
Bram Cohen, Incentives build Robustness in BitTorrent