SybilQuorum: Open Distributed Ledgers Through Trust Networks
This addresses the Sybil attack issue for peer-to-peer and distributed ledger systems, offering an alternative to resource-based defenses, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing Federated Byzantine Agreement theory.
The authors tackled the Sybil attack problem in open distributed ledgers by proposing SybilQuorum, which leverages social network-based trust relationships to secure consensus among honest participants, and empirically evaluated it as a secure Federated Byzantine Agreement System with theoretical extensions.
The Sybil attack plagues all peer-to-peer systems, and modern open distributed ledgers employ a number of tactics to prevent it from proof of work, or other resources such as space, stake or memory, to traditional admission control in permissioned settings. With SybilQuorum we propose an alternative approach to securing an open distributed ledger against Sybil attacks, and ensuring consensus amongst honest participants, leveraging social network based Sybil defences. We show how nodes expressing their trust relationships through the ledger can bootstrap and operate a value system, and general transaction system, and how Sybil attacks are thwarted. We empirically evaluate our system as a secure Federated Byzantine Agreement System, and extend the theory of those systems to do so.