Trust-based Routing for Kademlia in a Sybil Scenario

Withstanding multiple false identities, also known as a Sybil attack, is one of the main challenges in securing structured peer-to-peer networks. Poisoning routing tables through these identities may make the routing process, needed for storing and retrieving resources within a DHT (Distributed Hash Table), extremely difficult and time consuming. We investigate current possible countermeasures and propose a novel method for making the routing in a Kademlia-based network more secure through the use of a trust-based routing algorithm exploiting reputation techniques. Our solution provides a balanced mixing of correct routing and trusted routing showing promising results in thwarting a Sybil attack in a Kademlia network, also in comparison with similar methods.