S/Kademlia: A Practicable Approach Towards Secure Key-Based Routing

Security is a common problem in completely decentralized peer-to-peer systems. Although several suggestions exist on how to create a secure key-based routing protocol, a practicable approach is still unattended. In this paper we introduce a secure key-based routing protocol based on Kademlia that has a high resilience against common attacks by using parallel lookups over multiple disjoint paths, limiting free nodeId generation with crypto puzzles and introducing a reliable sibling broadcast. The latter is needed to store data in a safe replicated way. We evaluate the security of our proposed extensions to the Kademlia protocol analytically and simulate the effects of multiple disjoint paths on lookup success under the influence of adversarial nodes.