Attacks against Network Coordinate System: Vulnerable PIC

In recent years, network coordinate systems which map nodes into a geometrical space can effectively support overlay applications relying on topology-awareness. However, these systems base on an ideal assumption that the nodes in them are honest to cooperate with each other. Although there have been some studies about attacks on network coordinate systems, the effect of attacks on PIC---one of the representative systems---has not been studied. Moreover, since PIC itself has proposed a security policy, how well it can protect PIC from attacks is another significant problem to be researched. We apply four typical attacks on PIC with security and without security. Our extensive experiments show that PIC is vulnerable by attacks and when the percentage of malicious nodes is more than 40%, PIC with security performs barely better than without security.