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.
Use of the plural pronoun is customary even in solely authored research papers; however, given the subject of the present paper, its use herein is particularly ironic.
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Douceur, J.R. (2002). The Sybil Attack. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, F., Rowstron, A. (eds) Peer-to-Peer Systems. IPTPS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45748-8_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45748-8_24
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