Reducing communication costs in robust peer-to-peer networks

Several recent research results describe how to design Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) that are robust to adversarial attack via Byzantine faults. Unfortunately, all of these results require a significant blowup in communication costs over standard DHTs. For example, to perform a lookup operation, all such robust DHTs of which we are aware require sending O(log3n) messages while standard DHTs require sending only O(logn), where n is the number of nodes in the network. In this paper, we describe protocols to reduce the communication costs of all such robust DHTs. In particular, we give a protocol to reduce the number of messages sent to perform a lookup operation from O(log3n) to O(log2n) in expectation. Moreover, we also give a protocol for sending a large (i.e. containing Ω(log4n) bits) message securely through a robust DHT that requires, in expectation, only a constant blowup in the total number of bits sent compared with performing the same operation in a standard DHT. This is an improvement over the O(log2n) bit blowup that is required to perform such an operation in all current robust DHTs. Both of our protocols are robust against an adaptive adversary.