Measuring “Sybil attacks” in Kademlia-based networks

In today's Internet, many peer-to-peer (P2P) applications deploy their distributed networks based on Kademlia, a robust distributed hash table (DHT) protocol. Since Kademlia has no mechanism to defend ID fraud, Sybil attack becomes a great threat on these P2P networks. However, to our best knowledge, Sybil attacks in real Kademlia-based networks has never been measured. In this paper, based on our own measurement tool, Rainbow, we measure Sybil attacks in Kademlia-based networks BTDHT and KAD. A number of characteristics of Sybil attacks are revealed. We believe that our measurement results may be useful for developing better countermeasures to deal with Sybil attacks in Kademlia-based networks.