Sybil Paper Review

 The paper analyzed the top power of faulty entities in a p2p system whose
entities' identification is not done centrally. The paper introduces
"Resource Challenges" as a mean to ensure the distinction of several
identities. Adopting this method, an entity with resources equal to at least
q minimally capable entities can introduce itself as q different entities
and thus make the p2p system vulnerable to failure and attacks.
 The key strength of the paper is its elaboration on the "Resource
Challenge" method and analyzing the increasingly growing influence of faulty
entities by using this method under specific conditions. Although the paper
is making very strong assumptions about the network, it is well illuminating
the disadvantages of using such a method for entity identification, even in
a real network.
 In a real p2p network, peers are heterogeneous and with a very large
spectrum of resources. Therefore, it seems so intuitive that going towards
"Resource Challening" as a mean to capture the identity of entities is not
applicable, since the extremely powerful entities can play the role of
several weak entities.
 As a matter of fact, when we're concerned about network failures and
mitigating it by means of redundancy in a p2p system, we might better worry
more about the "real" availability of each entity, rather than simply the
"real" number of entities we have. Since, a single faulty entity can not lie
about its availability even if it is representing itself as many identities
in the network. This approch however does not work for the purpose of
Privacy.
Received on Thu Nov 17 2005 - 10:20:47 EST