ReDS

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures are gaining popularity and importance for applications ranging from massive-scale Internet content delivery to mobile social networks. Such P2P systems must provide directory services for locating peers with the desired content and services. These directory services are themselves decentralized, such as with distributed hash tables (DHTs), which allow for efficient locating of objects without any centralized directory. Being a distributed system over a diverse set of untrusted nodes, however, such directory services must be resilient to adversarial behavior. Otherwise, the entire P2P system can be crippled by manipulating or simply denying access to resources. We propose Reputation for Directory Services (ReDS), a framework for using reputation management to enhance the security of finding information in distributed systems. While previous reputation systems have addressed several specific applications of P2P networks (e.g., by identifying peers who share bad files), directory services form the backbone of P2P systems and have unique properties with respect to reputation that make them worth investigating. In this extended abstract, we motivate our investigation of ReDS and describe preliminary results that show its effectiveness in the Salsa P2P system.