Provable Polylog Routing for Darknets

Stefanie Roos, Thorsten Strufe

Abstract: Darknets, anonymous and membership-concealing P2P networks, aim at providing censorship-resistance without relying on a central authority. An efficient routing algorithm is needed to create Darknets that offer an acceptable performance to a large number of users. Designing such an algorithm is hard due to the restricted topology of Darknets, which has not been modelled adequately up to now. We present such a model of Darknets by modifying Kleinberg's small-world model [1] and a new algorithm, NextBestOnce. It is shown analytically that NextBestOnce takes O(log 2 n) steps on our model, simulations show that it performs better than existing Darknet routing algorithms such as the one used in the dark Freenet [2], especially with regard to the maximal path length which is bounded by O(log 2 n) for NextBestOnce, but scales linearly in case of Freenet.