Susceptibility Analysis of Structured P2P Systems to Localized Eclipse Attacks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols are susceptible to Localized Eclipse Attacks (LEA), i.e., attacks where a victim peer´s environment is masked by malicious peers which are then able to instigate progressively insidious security attacks. To obtain effective placement of malicious peers, LEAs significantly benefit from overlay topology-awareness. Hence, we propose heuristics for Chord, Pastry and Kademlia to assess the protocols´ LEA susceptibility based on their topology characteristics and overlay routing mechanisms. As a result, our method can be used for P2P protocol parameter tuning in order to substantially mitigate LEAs. We present evaluations highlighting LEA´s impact on contemporary P2P protocols. Our proposed heuristics are abstract in nature, making them applicable plus customizable for many other structured P2P protocols. We validate our model´s accuracy through a simulation case study.