The Sybil Attack

  • Authors:
  • John R. Douceur

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IPTPS '01 Revised Papers from the First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Large-scale peer-to-peer systems face security threats from faulty or hostile remote computing elements. To resist these threats, many such systems employ redundancy. However, if a single faulty entity can present multiple identities, it can control a substantial fraction of the system, thereby undermining this redundancy. One approach to preventing these "Sybil attacks" is to have a trusted agency certify identities. This paper shows that, without a logically centralized authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of resource parity and coordination among entities.