New Scientist: ‘Rewiring’ File-Sharing Networks May Stop Attacks

“A US bill proposed in July 2002 would give copyright holders
the legal power to attack the computers of file sharers suspected
of piracy. Experts say it would be relatively easy to log on to a
network and deliberately overload suspected users with fake
requests for a file, by misinforming other ‘nodes’. This is similar
to overloading a web site with fake traffic in a ‘denial of
service’ attack.

“But Neil Daswani and Hector Garcia-Molina of the Database
Research Department at Stanford University in the US believe it may
be possible to redesign peer-to-peer networks to protect them
against such attacks. Daswani says this may also guard these
networks against malicious computer hackers. He told New Scientist:
‘We were interested in both protecting the network from being shut
down and protecting individual users.’

“Daswani and Garcia-Molina mathematically modeled the popular
open source network Gnutella and experimented with different
combinations of existing rules for efficiently sharing file
requests across a network. This network consists of ordinary users,
or ‘nodes’ and ‘supernodes’, which have higher bandwidth. Requests
are broadcast between nodes and supernodes with little
discrimination…”

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