Abstract
Peer-to-peer (P2P) and grid systems allow their users to exchange information and share resources, with little centralised or hierarchical control, instead relying on the fairness of the users to make roughly as much resources available as they use. To enforce this balance, some kind of currency or barter (called karma) is needed that must be exchanged for resources thus limiting abuse. We present a completely decentralised, off-line karma implementation for P2P and grid systems, that detects double-spending and other types of fraud under varying adversarial scenarios. The system is based on tracing the spending pattern of coins, and distributing the normally central role of a bank over a predetermined, but random, selection of nodes. The system is designed to allow nodes to join and leave the system at arbitrary times.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Xgrid website, http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/
Abadi, M., Burrows, M., Manasse, M., Wobber, T.: Moderately hard, memorybound functions. In: Proceedings of the 10th NDSS, February 2003, pp. 25–39. Internet Society, San Diego (2003)
Adar, E., Huberman, B.A.: Free riding on gnutella. First Monday 5(10) (October 2000), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/adar/index.html
Back, A.: Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure (March 1997), http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash
Castro, M., Druschel, P., Ganesh, A.J., Rowstron, A.I.T., Wallach, D.S.: Secure routing for structured Peer-to-Peer overlay networks. In: Proceedings of the 5th OSDI, Operating Systems Review, December 9–11, pp. 299–314. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Chaum, D., Pedersen, T.P.: Transferred cash grows in size. In: Rueppel, R.A. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1992. LNCS, vol. 658, pp. 390–407. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Chvßtal, V.: The tail of the hypergeometric distribution. Discrete Mathematics 25(3), 285–287 (1979)
Clarke, I., Sandberg, O., Wiley, B., Hong, H.: Freenet: a distributed anonymous information storage and retrieval system. In: International Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability, pp. 311–320 (2000)
Cohen, B.: Incentives build robustness in bittorrent. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, Berkeley, CA, USA (2003)
Dwork, C., Goldberg, A., Naor, M.: On memory-bound functions for fighting spam. In: Boneh, D. (ed.) CRYPTO 2003. LNCS, vol. 2729, pp. 426–444. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Garcia, F.D., Hoepman, J.-H.: Off-line karma: Towards a decentralized currency for peer-to-peer and grid applications (brief abstract). In: Workshop on Secure Multiparty Computations (SMP), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Oct. 7–8 (2004)
Garcia, F.D., Hoepman, J.-H.: Off-line karma: A decentralized currency for static peer-to-peer and grid networks. In: 5th Int. Networking Conf. (INC) (to appear, 2005)
Glassman, S., Manasse, M., Abadi, M., Gauthier, P., Sobalvarro, P.: The MilliCent protocol for inexpensive electronic commerce. In: Fourth International Conference on the World-Wide-Web, December 1995, pp. 603–618. MIT/O’Reilly, Boston (1995)
Hoeffding, W.: Probability inequalities for sums of bounded random variables. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 58, 13–30 (1963)
Kirk, P.: Gnutella, http://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net
Micali, S., Ohta, K., Reyzin, L.: Accountable-subgroup multisignatures: extended abstract. In: Samarati, P. (ed.) Proceedings of the 8th CCS, Philadelphia, PA, USA, November 2001, pp. 245–254. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Ohta, K., Okamoto, T.: Multi-signature scheme secure against active insider attacks. In: IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences E82–A(1), 21–31 (1999)
Ratnasamy, S., Francis, P., Handley, M., Karp, R., Shenker, S.: A scalable Content-Addressable network. In: Guerin, R. (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2001 Conference (SIGCOMM 2001), August 27–31. Computer Communication Review, vol. 31(4), pp. 161–172. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Rivest, R.L.: Peppercoin micropayments. In: Juels, A. (ed.) FC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3110, pp. 2–8. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Rivest, R.L., Shamir, A.: PayWord and MicroMint: Two simple micropayment schemes. In: Lomas, M. (ed.) Security Protocols 1996. LNCS, vol. 1189, pp. 69–87. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Rowstron, A., Druschel, P.: Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location, and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In: Guerraoui, R. (ed.) Middleware 2001. LNCS, vol. 2218, pp. 329–350. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Stoica, I., Morris, R., Karger, D., Kaashoek, M.F., Balakrishnan, H.: Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications. In: Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, pp. 149–160. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Vishnumurthy, V., Chandrakumar, S., Sirer, E.G.: KARMA: a secure economic framework for peer-to-peer resource sharing. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, Berkeley, California (2003), Papers published on Website: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/p2pecon/index.html
Yang, B., Garcia-Molina, H.: PPay: micropayments for peer-to-peer systems. In: Atluri, V., Liu, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS-2003), October 27–30, pp. 300–310. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Zhao, B.Y., Huang, L., Rhea, S.C., Stribling, J., Joseph, A.D., Kubiatowicz, J.D.: Tapestry: A global-scale overlay for rapid service deployment. IEEE J-SAC 22(1), 41–53 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Garcia, F.D., Hoepman, JH. (2005). Off-Line Karma: A Decentralized Currency for Peer-to-peer and Grid Applications. In: Ioannidis, J., Keromytis, A., Yung, M. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3531. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11496137_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11496137_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26223-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31542-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)