NCShield: Protecting Decentralized, Matrix Factorization-Based Network Coordinate Systems

Abstract

Network Coordinate (NC) systems provide a scalable means for Internet distance prediction and are useful for various Internet-based services, such as cloud or web-based services. Decentralized, matrix factorization-based NC (MFNC) systems have received particular attention recently. They can serve large-scale distributed services (as opposed to centralized NC systems) and do not need to satisfy the triangle inequality (as opposed to Euclidean-based NC systems). However, because of their decentralized nature, MFNC systems are vulnerable to various malicious attacks.In this paper, we provide the first study on attacks toward MFNC systems, and propose a trust and reputation-based approach called NCShield to counter such attacks. It is fully decentralized and can easily be customized. Different from previous approaches, NCShield is able to distinguish between legitimate distance variations and malicious distance alterations. Using four representative data sets from the Internet, we show that NCShield can defend against not only the typical disorder, repulsion and isolation attacks, but also more advanced attacks such as frog-boiling attacks. For example, when selecting node pairs with a shorter distance than a predefined threshold in an online game scenario, even if 30% nodes are malicious, NCShield can reduce the false positive rate from 45.5% to 3.7%.

Towards Security Joint Trust and Game Theory for Maximizing Utility: Challenges and Countermeasures

“…In addition to the explicit type of game model, researchers have established some game models based on different application scenarios [70][71][72][73][74]. Most of these game models are established with the following objectives as the ultimate goal: To establish trust relationships and increase the credibility of data, to defend against malicious attacks in the network, to help the system by choosing a better strategy, and to maximize network utility by achieving these goals [75][76][77][78][79][80][81].…”

“…Wu et al [60] Ruan et al [61] John et al [62] Wu et al [63] Jin and van Dijk [64] Yu et al [66] Abbass et al [68] Chica et al [69] Hu et al [6] Zhu et al [70] Ding et al [71] Zhang et al [72] Aloqaily et al [74] Rishwaraj et al [75] Pouryazdan et al [76] Chen et al [77] Lorenzo et al [78] Li et al [79] Aroyo et al [80] Moghadam and Modares [81] Cui et al [28] Yin et al [26] Chen et al [27] Li et al [14] According to whether the players cooperate, the game is divided into cooperative game and non-cooperative game. The common goal of both games can maximize network utility and improve network security.…”

“…Combining the game model with the trust relationship improves the reliability of the data in the network [75,76,80]. The introduction of the game model improves the security of the network and against external and internal attacks [14,70,72,74,77]. There are also some game models that provide great help for network or system strategy selection [27,71,78,79,81], or addressed the problem of resource allocation [26].…”