A churn-resistant peer-to-peer web caching system

Abstract

Denial of service attacks on peer-to-peer (p2p) systems can arise from sources otherwise considered non-malicious. We focus on one such commonly prevalent source, called "churn". Churn arises from continued and rapid arrival and failure (or departure) of a large number of participants in the system, and traces from deployments have shown that it can lead to extremely stressful networking conditions. It has the potential to increase host loads and block a large fraction of normal insert and lookup operations in the peer-to-peer system. This paper studies a cooperative web caching system that is resistant to churn attacks. Based on the Kelips peer-to-peer routing substrate, it imposes a constant load on participants and is able to reorganize itself continuously under churn. Peer pointers are automatically established among more available participants, thus ensuring high cache hit rates even when the system is stressed under churn. In addition, the system improves on the network locality of cache accesses in previous web caching schemes. The paper presents experimental results from a real implementation running over a commodity PC cluster, as well as trace-based simulations that use real host availability traces obtained from another deployed p2p system.