Source code of the attacks presented in the paper "HyperLogLog: exponentially bad"

Our attacks demonstrates how an adversary can perform a cardinality manipulation attack on the HyperLogLog sketch, when having access to various low level details of the implementation.

All attacks discussed in our paper are implemented and tested in this repository.

Attacks on Classic HLL

We attack clarkduvall's popular implementation of classic HLL.

As the implementation is in Go, make sure first that Go is properly installed on your machine (see the official documentation if needed).

Once in the classic_hll/ folder, running

go run attack_hll.go

will run all attacks for some pre-defined scenarios of interest and print the results. If you want to test our attacks in more settings, you can use the runAttack function where you can specify, among other variables, the adversarial scenario and the number of items already in the sketch. We refer to its API for the exhaustive list of parameters.

Note 1: Depending on your setup you might have a module error. In our case, using the command

GO111MODULE=off go run attack_hll.go

instead did the trick.

Note 2: Be aware that we set the number of iterations to 50 by default, causing the attacks results to take quite some time to be printed. You can change it here to a lower value to have results faster.

Attacks on Redis's implementation

Once in the redis/ folder, run

make

to compile and install Redis. Our attack is contained in the new command PFATTACK [key].

In a first tab spawn the server with

./src/redis-server

and in a second tab the client with

./src/redis-cli

Launch the attck on the client side by running (on the client side)

PFATTACK hll

The initial cardinality of the attacked sketch will be printed on the server's console (after inserting 2^(t-1)*m*ln(m) honest items first). Maliciously picked items are then added to the HLL sketch denoted hll, stored on the server's side. The command returns the number of inserted items to the server. To observe the resulting change in cardinality, use the command PFCOUNT hll on the client side after the attack.

There are several parameters that can changed in the src/hyperloglog.c file: T controls the number of initial items to insert is controlled. The possible values are 1: m*ln(m) items are added before the attack, 2: 2*m*ln(m) items are added, and 3: 4*m*ln(m) items are added, with m the number of buckets used by Redis (16'384 by default). If you want to conduct an attack against an empty sketch, you can use our global variable EMPTY and set it to true. Those two variables and the attack parameter EPSILON can be modified at those lines.