An Analysis of BitTorrent’s Two Kademlia-Based DHTs

Date
2007-05-26
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Description
Abstract

Despite interest in structured peer-to-peer overlays and their scalability to millions of nodes, few, if any, overlays operate at that scale. This paper considers the distributed hash table extensions supported by modern BitTorrent clients, which implement a Kademlia-style structured overlay network among millions of BitTorrent users. As there are two disjoint Kademlia-based DHTs in use, we collected two weeks of traces from each DHT. We examine churn, reachability, latency, and liveness of nodes in these overlays, and identify a variety of problems, such as median lookup times of over a minute. We show that Kademlia’s choice of iterative routing and its lack of a preferential refresh of its local neighborhood cause correctness problems and poor performance. We also identify implementation bugs, design issues, and security concerns that limit the effectiveness of these DHTs and we offer possible solutions for their improvement.

Description
Advisor
Degree
Type
Technical report
Keywords
Citation

Crosby, Scott A. and Wallach, Dan S.. "An Analysis of BitTorrent�s Two Kademlia-Based DHTs." (2007) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96357.

Has part(s)
Forms part of
Published Version
Rights
You are granted permission for the noncommercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, but this permission is only for a period of forty-five (45) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the Computer Science Department of Rice University under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).
Link to license
Citable link to this page