Evaluating Sybil Attacks in P2P Infrastructures for Online Social Networks

In recent years, online social networks (OSN) have become very popular. These types of networks have been useful to find former classmates or to improve our interaction with friends. Currently, a huge amount of information is generated and consumed by millions of people from these types of networks. Most popular online social networks are based on centralized servers, which are responsible for the management and storage all information. Although online social networks introduce several benefits, these networks still face many challenges such as central control, privacy or security. P2P infrastructures have emerged as an alternative platform to deploy decentralized online social networks. However, decentralized distributed systems are vulnerable to malicious peers. In this work, we evaluate P2P infrastructures against Sybil attacks. In particular, we simulate and evaluate hybrid and distributed P2P architectures.