A denial-of-service resistant DHT

ABSTRACT

We consider the problem of designing scalable and robust information systems based on multiple servers that can survive even massive denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. More precisely, we are focusing on designing a scalable distributed hash table (DHT) that is robust against so-called past insider attacks. In a past insider attack, an adversary knows everything about the system up to some time point t₀ not known to the system. After t₀, the adversary can attack the system with a massive DoS attack in which it can block a constant fraction of the servers of its choice. Yet, the system should be able to survive such an attack in a sense that for any set of lookup requests, one per non-blocked (i.e., non-DoS attacked) server, every lookup request to a data item that was last updated after t₀ can be served by the system, and processing all the requests just needs polylogarithmic time and work at every server. We show that such a system can be designed.

REFERENCES

• 1: George Lawton, Stronger Domain Name System Thwarts Root-Server Attacks, Computer, v.40 n.5, p.14-17, May 2007 [doi>10.1109/MC.2007.184]
• 2: B. Awerbuch and C. Scheideler. A denial-of-service resistant DHT. See http://www14.in.tum.de/personen/scheideler.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.2 ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY
      F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems
          Subjects: Routing and layout

General Terms:
Algorithms, Reliability, Theory

Keywords:
denial-of-service attacks, distributed information systems