Bypass: Providing secure DHT routing through bypassing malicious peers

Much research has been devoted to the development of efficient distributed hash tables (DHTs). While many works have studied DHT systems, few have examined their security issues. For example, chord and other DHT implementations rely on the cooperation of individual peers to route requests. Consequently, any malicious node can drop and misroute messages at will, censoring the access of honest peers to content. In this paper, we introduce bypass, a novel DHT routing protocol designed to mitigate routing attacks. A key distinguishing feature of bypass from other implementations is a feedback-based filtering protocol that allows peers to avoid adversarial nodes when routing to the correct holders of a key. Our experimental results show that in principle bypass can achieve a lookup success rate close to theoretical bounds.