Attack-resistant Spanning Tree Construction in Route-Restricted Overlay Networks

Abstract

Nodes in route-restricted overlays have an im-mutable set of neighbors, explicitly specified by their users. Pop-ular examples include payment networks such as the Lightningnetwork as well as social overlays such as the Dark Freenet.Routing algorithms are central to such overlays as they enablecommunication between nodes that are not directly connected.Recent results show that algorithms based on spanning treesare the most promising provably efficient choice. However, allsuggested solutions fail to address how distributed spanning treealgorithms can deal with active denial of service attacks bymalicious nodes.In this work, we design a novel self-stabilizing spanning treeconstruction algorithm that utilizes cryptographic signatures andprove that it reduces the set of nodes affected by active attacks.Our simulations substantiate this theoretical result withconcretevalues based on real-world data sets. In particular, our resultsindicate that our algorithm reduces the number of affectednodes by up to 74% compared to state-of-the-art attack-resistantspanning tree constructions