A Taxonomy of Rational Attacks

• Seth James Nielson
• Scott S. Crosby
• Dan S. Wallach

For peer-to-peer services to be effective, participating nodes must cooperate, but in most scenarios a node represents a self-interested party and cooperation can neither be expected nor enforced. A reasonable assumption is that a large fraction of p2p nodes are rational and will attempt to maximize their consumption of system resources while minimizing the use of their own. If such behavior violates system policy then it constitutes an attack. In this paper we identify and create a taxonomy for rational attacks and then identify corresponding solutions if they exist. The most effective solutions directly incentivize cooperative behavior, but when this is not feasible the common alternative is to incentivize evidence of cooperation instead.

Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '05), (Ithica, New York), February, 2005.

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