Cheating in public distributed computing

Cheating is a serious problem in public distributed computing. For both, the organizers of a project who might get false results and for common users who are deprived of a proper ranking in contributor statistics. Most organisations prefer not to speak publically about cheating. This is usually due to fear of losing the goodwill of contributors or to avoid giving hints to cheaters. But it is clear that "security by obscurity" or simply denying a problem at all are not adequate ways to handle this problem.

Lecture at 20C3:

There is no way around the fundamental truth that public distributed computing relies on contributions of essentially untrusted machines. But there are ways to minimize the impact and feasibility of cheating in public distributed computing projects. In a lecture at the 20th Chaos Communication Congress I outlined the problem and described possible ways to deal with it. The slides are now available as a pdf file under a Creative Commons License:

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Three basic guidelines on how to cope with cheating in public distributed computing.

1. Dont distribute "yes/no" jobs but aim for complex results to enable useful redundant verification
-> if you are really good you might implement magic ringers

2. Track work assignments in order to detect numerous "script kiddie" cheats
-> if you are really good you would use a public key infrastructure

3. A correct/trustworthy finaly result must be achievable even if some cheating remains undetected
-> rarely is it possible to efficiently verify the perfect correctness of all distributed jobs