DDoS Attack by File Request Redirection in Kad P2P Network

Abstract

In recent years, Peer to Peer system has shown tremendous growth enabling millions of concurrent users exchange information seamlessly. Kad is a Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Table implementation in real P2P applications which has millions of simultaneous users as to date. However, it comes with several vulnerable features which allow attacks, especially DDoS attacks. In this paper, we proposed a new DDoS attack caused by changing source IP address in response message of source search. In the proposed attack, there are two types of attackers, which change their KadID as KeywordID for keyword search and File Hash for source search as well. When a normal user selects the keyword and file as target, the user generates unintentionally traffics to a victim. To verify the effectiveness of our attack and its dangerousness, we test our scheme in Kad network. Our results show the potential risk of DDoS attack caused by the weakness of the Kad network.