Reducing Communication Costs in Robust Peer-to-Peer Networks

A Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is a structured peer-to-peer (p2p) network which provides for scalable and distributed storage and look-up of data items. Because peer-to-peer networks have little to no admission control, there has been significant effort in designing DHT's which are robust to Byzantine faults. When a peer suffers a Byzantine fault it is assumed to be controlled by an adversary who uses that peer to try to disrupt the network. The authors refer to the peers that suffer Byzantine faults as bad and the remaining peers as good. Several recent results describe DHTs that are robust to adversarial attack via Byzantine faults.