The lotus-eater attack

Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, Joseph Y. Halpern
2008 Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '08  
Many protocols for distributed and peer-to-peer systems have the feature that nodes will stop providing service for others once they have received a certain amount of service. Examples include BitTorent's unchoking policy, BAR Gossip's balanced exchanges, and threshold strategies in scrip systems. An attacker can exploit this by providing service in a targeted way to prevent chosen nodes from providing service. While such attacks cannot be prevented, we discuss techniques that can be used to
more » ... it the damage they do. These techniques presume that a certain number of processes will follow the recommended protocol, even if they could do better by "gaming" the system.
doi:10.1145/1400751.1400853 dblp:conf/podc/KashFH08 fatcat:lvm53bbctrfsrf7kltoas3i3ry