Provable Polylog Routing for Darknets

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(log2 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(log2 n) for NextBestOnce, but scales linearly in case of Freenet.