Pong-cache poisoning in GUESS

This paper studies the problem of resource discovery in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. We propose simple policies that make the discovery of resources resilient to coordinated attacks by malicious nodes. We focus on a novel P2P protocol called GUESS [8] that uses a pong cache, a set of currently known nodes, to discover new ones. We define a simple, abstract model of a GUESS network,and We describe how to limit pong cache poisoning, a condition in which the ids of malicious nodes appear in the pong caches of good nodes. We run simulations based on our model, and evaluate different options for the key decisions that nodes need to make.We propose an ID smearing algorithm (IDSA) and a dynamic network partitioning (DNP) scheme that can be used together to reduce the impact of malicious nodes. We also propose adding an introduction protocol (IP) as a basic mechanism to GUESS to ensure liveness. We suggest using a most-recently-used (MRU) cache replacement policy to slow down the rate of poisoning. Finally, we determine the marginal utility of using a malicious node detector (MND) to further limit poisoning, and the level of accuracy required of the detector.