Veracity: practical secure network coordinates via vote-based agreements

  • Authors:
  • Micah Sherr;Matt Blaze;Boon Thau Loo

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • USENIX'09 Proceedings of the 2009 conference on USENIX Annual technical conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Decentralized network coordinate systems promise efficient network distance estimates across Internet end-hosts. These systems support a wide range of network services, including proximity-based routing, neighbor selection in overlays, network-aware overlays, and replica placement in content-distribution networks. This paper describes Veracity, a practical fully-decentralized service for securing network coordinate systems. In Veracity, all advertised coordinates and subsequent coordinate updates must be independently verified by a small set of nodes via a voting scheme. Unlike existing approaches, Veracity does not require any a priori secrets or trusted parties, and does not depend on outlier analysis of coordinates based on a fixed set of neighbors. We have implemented Veracity by modifying an open-source network coordinate system, and have demonstrated within a simulated network environment and deployment on PlanetLab that Veracity mitigates attacks for moderate sizes of malicious nodes (up to 30% of the network), even when coalitions of attackers coordinate their attacks. We further show that Veracity resists high levels of churn and incurs only a modest communication overhead.