Kademlia - Next Generation

Next Generation

During the years, the academic and practitioner communities have realized that all current DHT designs suffer from a security weakness, known as the Sybil attack. Petar Maymounkov, one of the original authors of Kademlia, has proposed a way to circumvent this weakness by incorporating social trust relationships into the system design. See, page 20 for social-network based approaches.

The new system, codenamed Tonika or also known by its domain name as 5ttt, is based on an algorithm design known as Electric routing and co-authored with the mathematician Jonathan Kelner. Maymounkov has now undertaken a comprehensive implementation effort of this new system, which is entirely based on the Go programming language. However, research into effective defences against Sybil attacks is generally considered an open question, and wide variety of potential defences are proposed every year in top security research conferences.