Attacking the Kad Network

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

4th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks

Research Article

Attacking the Kad Network

Cite: BibTeX Plain Text

@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1460877.1460907,
    author={Peng Wang and James Tyra and Eric Chan-Tin and Tyson Malchow and Denis Foo Kune and Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim},
    title={Attacking the Kad Network},
    proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks},
    publisher={ACM},
    proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
    year={2008},
    month={9},
    keywords={P2P Security Attack Kad},
    doi={10.1145/1460877.1460907}
}

Peng Wang
James Tyra
Eric Chan-Tin
Tyson Malchow
Denis Foo Kune
Nicholas Hopper
Yongdae Kim
Year: 2008
Attacking the Kad Network
SECURECOMM
ACM
DOI: 10.1145/1460877.1460907

Peng Wang¹^,*, James Tyra¹^,*, Eric Chan-Tin¹^,*, Tyson Malchow¹^,*, Denis Foo Kune¹^,*, Nicholas Hopper¹^,*, Yongdae Kim¹^,*

1: University of Minnesota - Twin Cities 200 Union Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455

*Contact email: pwang@cs.umn.edu, tyra@cs.umn.edu, dchantin@cs.umn.edu, malchow@cs.umn.edu, foo@cs.umn.edu, hopper@cs.umn.edu, kyd@cs.umn.edu

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.

Keywords: P2P Security Attack Kad

Published: 2008-09-25
Publisher: ACM
Modified: 2010-05-16

: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1460877.1460907