johndo@microsoft.com
“One can have, some claim, as many electronic personas as one has time and energy to create.”
– Judith S. Donath 12 »
Abstract – Large-scale peer-to-peer systems face
security threats from faulty or hostile remote
computing elements. To resist these threats, many
such systems employ redundancy. However, if a
single faulty entity can present multiple identities,
it can control a substantial fraction of the system,
thereby undermining this redundancy. One
approach to preventing these “Sybil attacks” is to
have a trusted agency certify identities. This
paper shows that, without a logically centralized
authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except
under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of
resource parity and coordination among entities.
“One can have, some claim, as many electronic personas as one has time and energy to create.”
– Judith S. Donath 12 »
Abstract – Large-scale peer-to-peer systems face
security threats from faulty or hostile remote
computing elements. To resist these threats, many
such systems employ redundancy. However, if a
single faulty entity can present multiple identities,
it can control a substantial fraction of the system,
thereby undermining this redundancy. One
approach to preventing these “Sybil attacks” is to
have a trusted agency certify identities. This
paper shows that, without a logically centralized
authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except
under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of
resource parity and coordination among entities.
