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Locust: Highly Concurrent DHT Experimentation Framework for Security Evaluations

Published: 13 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Distributed Hash Table (DHT) protocols, such as Kademlia, provide a decentralized key-value lookup which is nowadays integrated into a wide variety of applications, such as Ethereum, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and BitTorrent. However, many security issues in DHT protocols have not been solved yet. DHT networks are typically evaluated using mathematical models or simulations, often abstracting away from artefacts that can be relevant for security and/or performance. Experiments capturing these artefacts are typically run with too few nodes.
In this paper, we provide Locust, a novel highly concurrent DHT experimentation framework written in Elixir, which is designed for security evaluations. This framework allows running experiments with a full DHT implementation and around 4,000 nodes on a single machine including an adjustable churn rate; thus yielding a favourable trade-off between the number of analysed nodes and being realistic. We evaluate our framework in terms of memory consumption, processing power, and network traffic.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICCNS '20: Proceedings of the 2020 10th International Conference on Communication and Network Security
November 2020
145 pages
ISBN:9781450389037
DOI:10.1145/3442520
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 13 March 2021

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  1. Distribued Hash Tables (DHT)
  2. Kademlia
  3. Security

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