Recursive replication: A survival solution for structured P2P information systems to denial of service attacks

Structured Peer to Peer overlays have shown to be a very good solution for building very large scale distributed information systems. Most of them are based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) that provide an easy way to manage replicas, thus facilitating high availability of data as well as fault tolerance. However, DHTs can also be affected by some well known Distributed Denial of Services attacks that can lead to almost complete unavailability of the stored objects. Very few powerful solutions exist for this kind of security weakness, and increasing the number of replicas for a given object seems to be the best known one. In this paper, we show how a recursive replicating schema can provide a good solution for this kind of attack.