Collusion-Resistant Sabotage-Tolerance Mechanisms for Volunteer Computing Systems

This paper presents a proposal of a collusion-resistant sabotage-tolerance mechanism against malicious sabotage attempts in volunteer computing (VC) systems. While VC systems reach the most powerful computing platforms, they are vulnerable to mischief because volunteers can output erroneous results, for various reasons ranging from hardware failure to intentional sabotage. To protect the integrity of data and validate the computation results, most VC systems rely on the replication-based sabotage-tolerance mechanisms such as the m-first voting. However, these mechanisms are powerless against malicious volunteers (saboteurs) that have intention and use some form of collusion. To face this collusion threat, this paper proposes a spot-checking-based mechanism, which estimates the frequency of malicious attempts and dynamically eliminates erroneous results from the system. Simulation of VCs shows that the proposed method can improve the performance of VC systems up to 30 percent, while guaranteeing the same level of computational correctness.