Attacking the Kad network

Peng Wang, James Tyra, Chan Tin Eric, Tyson Malchow, Denis Foo Kune, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Kad network, an implementation of the Kademlia DHT protocol, supports the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing network and has over 1 million concurrent nodes. We describe several attacks that exploit critical design weaknesses in Kad to allow an attacker with modest resources to cause a significant fraction of all searches to fail. We measure the cost and effectiveness of these attacks against a set of 16,000 nodes connected to the operational Kad network. We also measure the cost of previously proposed, generic DHT attacks against the Kad network and find that our attacks are much more cost effective. Finally, we introduce and evaluate simple mechanisms to significantly increase the cost of these attacks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm'08
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm'08 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: Sep 22 2008Sep 25 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm'08

Other

Other4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm'08
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period9/22/089/25/08

Keywords

  • Attack
  • Kad
  • P2P
  • Security

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