35 research outputs found
Adding Query Privacy to Robust DHTs
Interest in anonymous communication over distributed hash tables (DHTs) has
increased in recent years. However, almost all known solutions solely aim at
achieving sender or requestor anonymity in DHT queries. In many application
scenarios, it is crucial that the queried key remains secret from intermediate
peers that (help to) route the queries towards their destinations. In this
paper, we satisfy this requirement by presenting an approach for providing
privacy for the keys in DHT queries.
We use the concept of oblivious transfer (OT) in communication over DHTs to
preserve query privacy without compromising spam resistance. Although our
OT-based approach can work over any DHT, we concentrate on communication over
robust DHTs that can tolerate Byzantine faults and resist spam. We choose the
best-known robust DHT construction, and employ an efficient OT protocol
well-suited for achieving our goal of obtaining query privacy over robust DHTs.
Finally, we compare the performance of our privacy-preserving protocols with
their more privacy-invasive counterparts. We observe that there is no increase
in the message complexity and only a small overhead in the computational
complexity.Comment: To appear at ACM ASIACCS 201
Pretty Private Group Management
Group management is a fundamental building block of today's Internet
applications. Mailing lists, chat systems, collaborative document edition but
also online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter use group management
systems. In many cases, group security is required in the sense that access to
data is restricted to group members only. Some applications also require
privacy by keeping group members anonymous and unlinkable. Group management
systems routinely rely on a central authority that manages and controls the
infrastructure and data of the system. Personal user data related to groups
then becomes de facto accessible to the central authority. In this paper, we
propose a completely distributed approach for group management based on
distributed hash tables. As there is no enrollment to a central authority, the
created groups can be leveraged by various applications. Following this
paradigm we describe a protocol for such a system. We consider security and
privacy issues inherently introduced by removing the central authority and
provide a formal validation of security properties of the system using AVISPA.
We demonstrate the feasibility of this protocol by implementing a prototype
running on top of Vuze's DHT
Resource-Efficient Communication in the Presence of Adversaries
This dissertation presents algorithms for achieving communication in the presence of adversarial attacks in large, decentralized, resource-constrained networks. We consider abstract single-hop communication settings where a set of senders wishes to directly communicate with a set of receivers . These results are then extended to provide resource-efficient, multi-hop communication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where energy is critically scarce, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, where bandwidth and computational power are limited. Our algorithms are provably correct in the face of attacks by a computationally bounded adversary who seeks to disrupt communication between correct participants.
The first major result in this dissertation addresses a general scenario involving single-hop communication in a time-slotted network where a single sender in wishes to transmit a message to a single receiver in . The two players share a communication channel; however, there exists an adversary who aims to prevent the transmission of by periodically blocking this channel. There are costs to send, receive or block on the channel, and we ask: How much do the two players need to spend relative to the adversary in order to guarantee transmission of the message?
This problem abstracts many types of conflict in information networks, and the associated costs represent an expenditure of network resources. We show that it is significantly more costly for the adversary to block than for the two players to achieve communication. Specifically, if the cost to send, receive and block in a slot are fixed constants, and the adversary spends a total of slots to try to block the message, then both the sender and receiver must be active in only O(á” â»Âč + 1) slots in expectation to transmit , where Ï = (1+ â5)/2 is the golden ratio. Surprisingly, this result holds even if (1) the value of is unknown to either player; (2) the adversary knows the algorithms of both players, but not their random bits; and (3) the adversary is able to launch attacks using total knowledge of past actions of both players. Finally, these results are applied to two concrete problems. First, we consider jamming attacks in WSNs and address the fundamental task of propagating from a single device to all others in a WSN in the presence of faults; this is the problem of reliable broadcast. Second, we examine how our algorithms can mitigate application-level distributed denial-of-service attacks in wired client-server scenarios.
The second major result deals with a single-hop communication problem where now consists of multiple senders and there is still a single receiver who wishes to obtain a message . However, many of the senders (strictly less than half) can be faulty, failing to send or sending incorrect messages. While the majority of the senders possess , rather than listening to all of and majority filtering on the received data, we desire an algorithm that allows the single receiver to decide on in a more efficient manner. To investigate this scenario, we define and devise algorithms for a new data streaming problem called the Bad Santa problem which models the selection dilemma faced by the receiver.
With our results for the Bad Santa problem, we consider the problem of energy-efficient reliable broadcast. All previous results on reliable broadcast require devices to spend significant time in the energy-expensive receiving state which is a critical problem in WSNs where devices are typically battery powered. In a popular WSN model, we give a reliable broadcast protocol that achieves optimal fault tolerance (i.e., tolerates the maximum number of faults in this WSN model)
and improves over previous results by achieving an expected quadratic decrease in the cost to each device. For the case where the number of faults is within a (1-â)-factor of the optimal fault tolerance, for any constant â>0, we give a reliable broadcast protocol that improves further by achieving an expected (roughly) exponential decrease in the cost to each device.
The third and final major result of this dissertation addresses single-hop communication where and both consist of multiple peers that need to communicate in an attack-resistant P2P network. There are several analytical results on P2P networks that can tolerate an adversary who controls a large number of peers and uses them to disrupt network functionality. Unfortunately, in such systems, operations such as data retrieval and message sending incur significant communication costs. Here, we employ cryptographic techniques to define two protocols both of which are more efficient than existing solutions. For a network of peers, our first protocol is deterministic with O(logÂČ) message complexity and our second protocol is randomized with expected O(log ) message complexity; both improve over all previous results. The hidden constants and setup costs for our protocols are small and no trusted third party is required. Finally, we present an analysis showing that our protocols are practical for deployment under significant churn and adversarial behaviour
Scalable and Secure Aggregation in Distributed Networks
We consider the problem of computing an aggregation function in a
\emph{secure} and \emph{scalable} way. Whereas previous distributed solutions
with similar security guarantees have a communication cost of , we
present a distributed protocol that requires only a communication complexity of
, which we prove is near-optimal. Our protocol ensures perfect
security against a computationally-bounded adversary, tolerates
malicious nodes for any constant (not
depending on ), and outputs the exact value of the aggregated function with
high probability
Tiny Groups Tackle Byzantine Adversaries
A popular technique for tolerating malicious faults in open distributed
systems is to establish small groups of participants, each of which has a
non-faulty majority. These groups are used as building blocks to design
attack-resistant algorithms.
Despite over a decade of active research, current constructions require group
sizes of , where is the number of participants in the system.
This group size is important since communication and state costs scale
polynomially with this parameter. Given the stubbornness of this logarithmic
barrier, a natural question is whether better bounds are possible.
Here, we consider an attacker that controls a constant fraction of the total
computational resources in the system. By leveraging proof-of-work (PoW), we
demonstrate how to reduce the group size exponentially to while
maintaining strong security guarantees. This reduction in group size yields a
significant improvement in communication and state costs.Comment: This work is supported by the National Science Foundation grant CCF
1613772 and a C Spire Research Gif
Octopus: A Secure and Anonymous DHT Lookup
Distributed Hash Table (DHT) lookup is a core technique in structured
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Its decentralized nature introduces security and
privacy vulnerabilities for applications built on top of them; we thus set out
to design a lookup mechanism achieving both security and anonymity, heretofore
an open problem. We present Octopus, a novel DHT lookup which provides strong
guarantees for both security and anonymity. Octopus uses attacker
identification mechanisms to discover and remove malicious nodes, severely
limiting an adversary's ability to carry out active attacks, and splits lookup
queries over separate anonymous paths and introduces dummy queries to achieve
high levels of anonymity. We analyze the security of Octopus by developing an
event-based simulator to show that the attacker discovery mechanisms can
rapidly identify malicious nodes with low error rate. We calculate the
anonymity of Octopus using probabilistic modeling and show that Octopus can
achieve near-optimal anonymity. We evaluate Octopus's efficiency on Planetlab
with 207 nodes and show that Octopus has reasonable lookup latency and
manageable communication overhead
Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple
authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by
all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially
adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and
privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for
designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance
privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in
terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of
decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by
designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography,
distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of
adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful
privacy-preserving decentralized systems