Abstract

Decentralized systems, such as structured overlays, are subject to the Sybil attack, in which an adversary creates many false identities to increase its influence. This paper describes a one-hop distributed hash table which uses the social links between users to strongly resist the Sybil attack. The social network is assumed to be fast mixing, meaning that a random walk in the honest part of the network quickly approaches the uniform distribution. As in the related SybilLimit system, with a social network of n honest nodes and m honest edges, the protocol can tolerate up to o(n/log n) attack edges (social links from honest nodes to compromised nodes). The routing tables contain O(√m log m) entries per node and are constructed efficiently by a distributed protocol. This is the first sublinear solution to this problem. Preliminary simulation results are presented to demonstrate the approach’s effectiveness.