nictuku/dht in the wild

Open-source is magical. When I wrote my distributed hash table library back in 2012, I just wanted to write something cool that made computers talk to each other efficiently at a very large scale.

Since publishing it, the library has been used by botnets, has a source code evolution video and was used by someone’s Bachelor thesis in Switzerland.

And today I found out that computer scientists from University of British Columbia and University of Bamberg have analyzed the library in a very cool paper to verify that it’s correct! They analyzed logs and checked that the library’s behavior follows invariants expected for a correct implementation of Kademlia.

In text: We logged state after the results of a Find_Value request were added to a peer’s routing table. On each execution we found that ∀ peers i, j, peeri .min_distance = peerj .min_distance in all total-order groups. This invariant, in conjunction with O(Loд(n)) message bound, provides strong evidence for the correctness of Nictuku’s implementation of Kademlia.

Very cool.