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Lecture

Decentralized Systems: Distributed Storage and Eclipse Attacks

In courses (2)

CS-438: Decentralized systems engineering

A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the engineering of their own decentralized system featuring messaging, file sha ...

CS-234: Technologies for democratic society

This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization. ...

Description

This lecture covers the concept of decentralized systems, focusing on distributed storage mechanisms like Napster and Gnutella, discussing how content is stored on local participants and the challenges related to availability and robustness. It also delves into Eclipse attacks, where malicious nodes can isolate specific nodes from the network, affecting the system's integrity. The instructor explains the importance of security measures against such attacks and the need for consistency in decentralized systems.

Instructors (3)

Pierluca Borsò

Bryan Alexander Ford

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. This forms a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.

Napster

Napster was a file sharing application that originally launched on June 1, 1999 with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

Distributed data store

A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a number of nodes, or a computer network in which users store information on a number of peer network nodes. Distributed databases are usually non-relational databases that enable a quick access to data over a large number of nodes.

Security

Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g.

Gnutella

Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computers increasing to over three million nodes by January 2006. In late 2007, it was the most popular file-sharing network on the Internet with an estimated market share of more than 40%.

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