IRIS: A Robust Information System Against Insider DoS Attacks

In this work, we present the first scalable distributed information system, that is, a system with low storage overhead, that is provably robust against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by a current insider. We allow a current insider to have complete knowledge about the information system and to have the power to block any ϵ-fraction of its servers by a DoS attack, where ϵ can be chosen up to a constant. The task of the system is to serve any collection of lookup requests with at most one per nonblocked server in an efficient way despite this attack. Previously, scalable solutions were only known for DoS attacks of past insiders, where a past insider only has complete knowledge about some past time point t0 of the information system. Scheideler et al. [Awerbuch and Scheideler 2007; Baumgart et al. 2009] showed that in this case, it is possible to design an information system so that any information that was inserted or last updated after t0 is safe against a DoS attack. But their constructions would not work at all for a current insider. The key idea behind our IRIS system is to make extensive use of coding. More precisely, we present two alternative distributed coding strategies with an at most logarithmic storage overhead that can handle up to a constant fraction of blocked servers.