FullReview: Practical Accountability in Presence of Selfish Nodes

Abstract

Accountability is becoming increasingly required in today's distributed systems. Indeed, accountability allows not only to detect faults but also to build provable evidence about the misbehaving participants of a distributed system. There exists a number of solutions to enforce accountability in distributed systems, among which PeerReview is the only solution that is not specific to a given application and that does not rely on any special hardware. However, this protocol is not resilient to selfish nodes, i.e. nodes that aim at maximising their benefit without contributing their fair share to the system. Our objective in this paper is to provide a software solution to enforce accountability on any underlying application in presence of selfish nodes. To tackle this problem, we propose the FullReview protocol. FullReview relies on game theory by embedding incentives that force nodes to stick to the protocol. We theoretically prove that our protocol is a Nash equilibrium, i.e. that nodes do not have any interest in deviating from it. Furthermore, we practically evaluate FullReview by deploying it for enforcing accountability in two applications:(1) SplitStream, an efficient multicast protocol, and (2) Onion routing, the most widely used anonymous communication protocol. Performance evaluation shows that FullReview effectively detects faults in presence of selfish nodes while incurring a small overhead compared to PeerReview and scaling as PeerReview.

Duck Attack on Accountable Distributed Systems

“…AcTinG [MDQ14a] is a protocol presented at SRDS 2014 and inspired by PeerReview [HKD07] and FullReview [DMAQ14]. These protocols rely on maintaining a secure data structure on each node which implements a tamper evident log.…”

“…AcTinG [MDQ14b], PeerReview [HKD07] and many others [BDHU09,DMAQ14] are based on the secure log structure proposed by Maniatis and Baker in [Pet02]. The security of their design is based on one-way hash function H (SHA-1 en 2002).…”

PAG: Private and Accountable Gossip

“…Accountability mechanisms (e.g., PeerReview [9], FullReview [11], AVMs [10]) are effective solutions to deter faults in distributed systems. These mechanisms have already been used as incentives for forcing selfish nodes to participate in gossip-based content sharing protocols (e.g., [12]).…”

“…In this context, accountability protocols, which have recently been proposed for fault detection in distributed systems (e.g., [9]- [11]) are promising candidates for effectively dealing with selfish behaviours. In an accountable system, nodes register their interactions with each other in secure logs.…”

A Framework for the Design Configuration of Accountable Selfish-Resilient Peer-to-Peer Systems

“…An alternative solution to the above static approach, is to employ recent accountability mechanisms (e.g., FullReview [13], Lifting [17], and PeerReview [19]), with the goal of dynamically forcing nodes to be responsible for their actions. Noteworthy among these mechanisms is FullReview, which appears to be the only one specifically designed for dealing with selfish nodes.…”