Sybil Who? How Encointer Uses Real-world Trust To Prevent Fraud

Encointer - Sybil Who? How Encointer Uses Real-World Trust to Prevent Fraud

A Sybil attack describes a scenario where an attacker subverts a reputation-based system by creating multiple identities. Read on to discover how Encointer uses a real-world web of trust to create a Sybil-resistant system.

“Sybil” is the name of a 1973 book about the psychiatric treatment of a woman with dissociative identity disorder, which resulted in her manifesting many different personalities. Over recent decades, as peer-to-peer computing has become more commonplace, researchers adopted the term “Sybil attack” to describe a form of computing-based fraud where one entity creates many different identities as a way of gaining outsize influence over a network.