Detecting Sybils in Peer-to-Peer File Replication Systems

Abstract

The test of a peer-to-peer file sharing network is how efficiently the objects are discovered and retrieved. One of the most important factors that contribute towards this is optimal replication of the objects across the network. One of the security threats to replication model is Sybil attack. In this paper we propose an approach that aims at detecting sybil identities in peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The sybils can corrupt, hide or destroy the replicas in file sharing network. This approach makes use of the fact that sybil doesn’t scale its storage to the factor of its identities. The approach safeguards the availability and accessibility of objects in a peer-to-peer network from sybil attack. Experimental evaluations have shown that our approach works very efficiently in detecting sybils. More than 50% of the sybils were detected in first few seconds of the simulation and loss or damage of objects is reduced to less than .0001%.