On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Alen Peacock wrote: > I think the belief that a central authority solves these problems > stems from the original, and quite excellent "Sybil Attack" paper > (http://www.cs.rice.edu/Conferences/IPTPS02/101.pdf), in which Douceur > shows that distributed authentication schemes alone are provably > insufficient to solve this problem. The language in the introduction > alludes to the idea that central authorities are the answer, but this > is never asserted outright, and is certainly not proven. In fairness, > if you limit the scope of the Sybil attack problem to "prevent a > single node from generating too many identities," or if you use the > term "entity" interchangeably with the term "computing node" then some > of my argument goes away, and that may be what was originally > intended.
This was my intention that a single node cannot generate too many identities. As you rightly point out, Sybil attack may be difficult to prevent against well-resourced adversaries that have access to multiple identities, including thousands of stolen credit card numbers. A node with a certified identifier does not prevent it from misbehaving later... But I think the semantic difference is important, > especially in the presence of well-heeled adversaries who have access > to multiple nodes and IP addresses. > _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
