Locust: Highly Concurrent DHT Experimentation Framework for Security Evaluations

Distributed Hash Table (DHT) protocols, such as Kademlia, provide a decentralized key-value lookup which is nowadays integrated into a wide variety of applications, such as Ethereum, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and BitTorrent. However, many security issues in DHT protocols have not been solved yet. DHT networks are typically evaluated using mathematical models or simulations, often abstracting away from artefacts that can be relevant for security and/or performance. Experiments capturing these artefacts are typically run with too few nodes. In this paper, we provide Locust, a novel highly concurrent DHT experimentation framework written in Elixir, which is designed for security evaluations. This framework allows running experiments with a full DHT implementation and around 4,000 nodes on a single machine including an adjustable churn rate; thus yielding a favourable trade-off between the number of analysed nodes and being realistic. We evaluate our framework in terms of memory consumption, processing power, and network traffic.