Analysis of Malicious Peers in Structured P2P Overlay Networks

The malicious behavior peer has crucial impact on the efficiency and integrity of structured p2p systems. The increasing complexity found in such systems, helps in some part to explain the large scale of the challenge faced in dealing with such problem. In such systems, node trust is often essential. However, the destructive and malicious intent of misbehaving peers is often overlooked, despite being one of the most difficult troubles faced in such systems. In this paper we propose a study of these malicious peers. We use a monitoring process, which involves the placement of few instrumented peers within the network. The goal of the monitoring process is to gather a wide set of metrics on the behavior of a peer. To achieve this, we analyze a large trace of messages and operations in the overlay, which gives an insight on the proprieties and peer behaviors. We focus on the communication protocol between peers. Our measurement infrastructure consists in a set of fake peers called Sybils doted with specific controllers in different level of the system. These Sybils are connected to different zones in the network and controlled by a coordinator.