Brief Update: Week 4

posted Jul 17, 2012 9:12 AM by Rebecca Navarre

Brief Update: July 17 In the past few days, Mahdi has been lecturing and informing us on the Hierarchical  Node ID Distribution process and chunk factors. Also, he informed us that Persea  has a way of not only testing the system against  Insertion attacks and back pointer attacks but also of using a silent or  active attacker.    Thus far we have been simulating with an active attacker but now we will test with a silent attacker as well(my simulations).    An active attacker will return an incorrect result where as a silent attacker will just  ignore the query or drop the request.    With a silent attacker, no incorrect result is returned so the look up request still has  a chance of a correct result being returned as well as the DHTs of the source remaining  uncorrupted. Thus we can see that usually the active attacker is a more malicious  threat, but also that it is harder to accomplish and requires more control/bandwidth.    Our prediction of the silent attacker simulations is that the probability of a successful  result will not be influenced by the number of silent attackers. This prediction has thus  far been correct with only one data point/simulation left to finish.