One rented /24 could eclipse a Kademlia node. Now it takes ten.
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . The setting py-libp2p speaks Kademlia — a distributed hash table where every node keeps a routing table of other nodes, bucketed by how far their IDs sit from its own. You find a peer or a record by asking the nodes closest to the target, who point you closer, and closer, until you arrive. It's elegant, and it…
The commit fixes Kademlia's admission rule by requiring distinct IP subnets instead of just node IDs in a k-bucket. This prevents a malicious actor from easily capturing a bucket by renting a large /24 network. The change isolates how an attacker can eclipse a node and measures the success of the attack on real lookups.
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