Routing in the Dark

In many networks, such as mobile ad-hoc networks and friend-to-friend overlay networks, direct communication between nodes is limited to specific neighbors. Often these networks have a small-world topology; while short paths exist between any pair of nodes in small-world networks, it is non-trivial to determine such paths with a distributed algorithm. Recently, Clarke and Sandberg proposed the first decentralized routing algorithm that achieves efficient routing in such small-world networks. This paper is the first independent security analysis of Clarke and Sandberg’s routing algorithm. We show that a relatively weak participating adversary can render the overlay ineffective without being detected, resulting in significant data loss due to the resulting load imbalance. We have measured the impact of the attack in a testbed of 800 nodes using minor modifications to Clarke and Sandberg’s implementation of their routing algorithm in Freenet. Our experiments show that the attack is highly effective, allowing a small number of malicious nodes to cause rapid loss of data on the entire network. We also discuss various proposed countermeasures designed to detect, thwart or limit the attack. While we were unable to find effective countermeasures, we hope that the presented analysis will be a first step towards the design of secure distributed routing algorithms for restricted-route topologies.