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0 pointsRealman781mo ago0 comments

In theory, if only Kiyeovo nodes were handling Kiyeovo records, then yes, they could kind of behave like their own subnetwork. The problem is that in a public DHT, the nodes responsible for storing keys are those closes to that key, we cannot guarantee it would be a Kiyeovo node. So even if Kiyeovo clients all use the same validation rules locally, the actual nodes that get hit with the queries do not. The chances of the network converging to the same, correct answer are much slimmer this way

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blamestross1mo ago

So DHT robustness against censorship is superlinear of the number of participants.

The "break point" is when a DHT gets big enough I can't realistically MITM all the links with nodes "closer to the target" than existing ones.

This means big networks are great, small ones are cheap to just break. Its hard to skip the messy bootstrapping phase.

I'd encourage protocols to only rely on DHTs for small key-value stores if there isn't a trust mechanism in place to validate new peers.

Otherwise, all I have to do is mine for O(n^2) dht keys that cover the network. Figure out what your key mining difficulty is and you can identify what the cost would be.

Realman78OP1mo ago

You're right in general. The main mitigation here is that Kiyeovo does not trust unsigned DHT data: the important records are signed and validated. That doesn't fully solve censorship nor eclipse attacks, but it does stop record forgery. The remaining risk is mostly availability/partitioning - bootstrap connectivity (topology) matters a lot here

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