Making Self-organizing Systems Secure

Abstract

Network overlays provide important routing functionality not supported directly by the Internet. Such functionality includes multicast routing, content-based routing, and resilient routing, as well as combinations thereof. As network overlays are starting to be deployed for critical applications such as Internet telephony (e.g., Skype), web casting/distance education, web conferencing (e.g., NetMeeting), and even DNS replacements (CoDons), efficiency and security are becoming important attributes. For example, a web cast of a political conference may be an attractive target. Alas, most current network overlays are built from Distributed Hash Tables and spanning trees, resulting in infrastructures that are easily compromised. But traditional protocols based on Byzantine agreement do not scale to the sizes required.