20,225 research outputs found
The state of peer-to-peer network simulators
Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results
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
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
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