The Lotus-Eater Attack

Abstract: Many protocols for distributed and peer-to-peer systems have the feature that nodes will stop providing service for others once they have received a certain amount of service. Examples include BitTorent's unchoking policy, BAR Gossip's balanced exchanges, and threshold strategies in scrip systems. An attacker can exploit this by providing service in a targeted way to prevent chosen nodes from providing service. While such attacks cannot be prevented, we discuss techniques that can be used to limit the damage they do. These techniques presume that a certain number of processes will follow the recommended protocol, even if they could do better by ``gaming'' the system.