SybilGuard: defending against sybil attacks via social networks

  • Authors:
  • Haifeng Yu;Michael Kaminsky;Phillip B. Gibbons;Abraham Flaxman

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Research Pittsburgh;Intel Research Pittsburgh;Intel Research Pittsburgh;Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Peer-to-peer and other decentralized,distributed systems are known to be particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks. In a sybil attack,a malicious user obtains multiple fake identities and pretends to be multiple, distinct nodes in the system. By controlling a large fraction of the nodes in the system,the malicious user is able to "out vote" the honest users in collaborative tasks such as Byzantine failure defenses. This paper presents SybilGuard, a novel protocol for limiting the corruptive influences of sybil attacks.Our protocol is based on the "social network "among user identities, where an edge between two identities indicates a human-established trust relationship. Malicious users can create many identities but few trust relationships. Thus, there is a disproportionately-small "cut" in the graph between the sybil nodes and the honest nodes. SybilGuard exploits this property to bound the number of identities a malicious user can create.We show the effectiveness of SybilGuard both analytically and experimentally.