Enforcing Collaboration in Peer-to-Peer Routing Services

Many peer-to-peer services rely on a cooperative model of interaction among nodes, yet actually provide little incentive for nodes to collaborate. In this paper, we develop a trust and security architecture for a routing and node location service based on Kademlia [1], a distributed hash table. Crucially, rather than ‘routing round’ defective or malicious nodes, we discourage free-riding by requiring a node to contribute honestly in order to obtain routing service in return. We claim that our trust protocol enforces collaboration and show how our modified version of Kademlia resists a wide variety of attacks.