Kadabra: Adapting Kademlia for the Decentralized Web

Blockchains have become the catalyst for a growing movement to create a more decentralized Internet. A fundamental operation of applications in a decentralized Internet is data storage and retrieval. As today's blockchains are limited in their storage functionalities, in recent years a number of peer-to-peer data storage networks have emerged based on the Kademlia distributed hash table protocol. However, existing Kademlia implementations are not efficient enough to support fast data storage and retrieval operations necessary for (decentralized) Web applications. In this paper, we present Kadabra, a decentralized protocol for computing the routing table entries in Kademlia to accelerate lookups. Kadabra is motivated by the multi-armed bandit problem, and can automatically adapt to heterogeneity and dynamism in the network. Experimental results show Kadabra achieving between 15-50% lower lookup latencies compared to state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: 26 pages, 19 figure

Mitigating Network Service Disruptions in High-bandwidth, Intermittently Connected, and Peer-to-Peer Networks

Users demand high-bandwidth, ubiquitous and low-cost network services. This demand has pushed ISPs and application providers to offer more bandwidth, allow users to access the Internet almost everywhere, and provide cheap or free network services using peer-to-peer networks. These three trends underlie the growing success of today's Internet. However, (1) high-bandwidth can empower more effective denial-of-service attacks; (2) Internet access is widespread, but still not ubiquitous; and (3) peer-to-peer network services need to solve the service discovery problem. This thesis addresses these three challenges. First, we tackle denial-of-service attacks. The high bandwidth available in many parts of the Internet allows denial-of-service attacks to be effective, and the large scale of the Internet makes detecting and preventing these attacks difficult. Anonymity and openness of the Internet worsens this problem because anyone can send anything to anybody. To prevent these denial-of-service attacks, we propose Permission-Based-Sending (PBS), a signaling architecture for network traffic authorization. PBS uses the explicit permission to give legitimate users the authority to send packets. Signaling is used to configure this permission in the data path. This signaling approach enables easy installation for granting authorization to flows, and allows PBS to be deployed in existing networks. In addition, a monitoring mechanism provides a second line of defense against attacks. Next, we strive to make Internet access more ubiquitous. When public transportation stations have access points to provide Internet access to passengers, public transportation becomes a more attractive travel and commute option. However, the Internet connectivity is intermittent because passengers can access the Internet only when a bus or train is within the networking coverage of an AP at a stop. To efficiently handle this intermittent network for the public transit system, we develop Internet Cache on Wheels (ICOW), a system that provides a low-cost way for bus and train operators to offer access to Internet content. Each bus and train car is equipped with a smart cache that serves popular content to passengers. The cache updates its content based on passenger requests when it is within range of Internet access points placed at bus stops, train stations or depots. This aggregated Internet access is significantly more efficient than having passengers contact Internet access points individually and ensures continuous availability of content throughout the journey. Finally, we consider peer-to-peer services. Typical service discovery mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks cause significant overhead, consuming energy and bandwidth: (1) in highly mobile networks, service discovery consumes the energy of mobile devices to discover services that newly joined members provide; and (2) peer-to-peer network systems consumes bandwidth during service discovery. To resolve and analyze these service discovery problems, (1) we design an efficient service discovery mechanism that reduces energy consumption of mobile devices; and (2) we evaluate the bandwidth consumption caused by service discovery in real-world peer-to-peer networks