A Model to Quantify the Success of a Sybil Attack Targeting RELOAD/Chord Resources

Abstract

The Sybil attack is one of the most harmful security threats for distributed hash tables (DHTs). This attack is not only a theoretical one, but it has been spotted "in the wild", and even performed by researchers themselves to demonstrate its feasibility. In this letter we analyse the Sybil attack whose objective is that the targeted resource cannot be accessed by any user of a Chord DHT, by replacing all the replica nodes that store it with sybils. In particular, we propose a simple, yet complete model that provides the number of random node-IDs that an attacker would need to generate in order to succeed with certain probability. Therefore, our model enables to quantify the cost of performing a Sybil resource attack on RELOAD/Chord DHTs more accurately than previous works, and thus establishes the basis to measure the effectiveness of different solutions proposed in the literature to prevent or mitigate Sybil attacks.