Tracking Relative Errors in Internet Coordinate Systems by a Kalman Filter

Internet Coordinate Systems, shortly ICS, (e.g. [9] [8]) have been proposed to allow for distance (Round-Trip Time, shortly RTT) estimation between nodes, in order to reduce the measurement overhead of many applications and overlay networks. Indeed, by embedding the Internet delay space into a metric space – an operation that only requires each node in the system to measure delays to a small set of other nodes (its neighbors), nodes are attributed coordinates that can then be used to estimate the RTT between any two nodes, without further measurements, simply by applying the distance function associated with the chosen metric space to the nodes’ coordinates. Recent works have shown how coordinate-embedding services could be vulnerable to malicious attacks, providing a potentially attractive fertile ground for the disruption or collapse of the many applications and overlays that would use these services [2]. There are actually two obvious ways to disrupt the operation of a coordinate based system. First when requested to give its coordinate for a distance estimation at the application-level, a malicious node could simply and blatantly lie. Second, a malicious node, or even a colluding group, may aim at disrupting the embedding process itself. This latter strategy is very insidious and effective as it can result in important distortions of the coordinate space which then spoils the coordinate computations of many nodes (malicious and honest alike) [2]. This chapter focuses on developing and studying generic Kalman filter-based methods to secure the coordinate embedding process. More precisely, the embedding process, regardless of the actual coordinate-based positioning system, works on the premise that nodes adjust their coordinate based on some comparison between measured and estimated distances to some other nodes. Malicious nodes can interfere with this embedding process by, amongst other things, lying about their real coordinate and/or tampering with measurement probes, to create a discrepancy between measured and estimated latencies, so that unsuspecting nodes would wrongly adjust their own coordinate in a bid to reduce the difference [1]. Because the load on the network naturally varies in time, so does latency between pair of nodes, and as a Source: Kalman Filter, Book edited by: Vedran Kordic, ISBN 978-953-307-094-0, pp. 390, May 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM