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R5N - Obfuscated mesh routing on hostile networks.

This document contains the R 5 N DHT technical specification. R 5 N is a secure distributed hash table (DHT) routing algorithm and data structure for decentralized applications. It features an open peer-to-peer overlay routing mechanism which supports ad-hoc permissionless participation and support for topologies in restricted-route environments. Optionally, the paths data takes through the overlay can be recorded, allowing decentralized applications to use the DHT to discover routes. This document defines the normative wire format of protocol messages, routing algorithms, cryptographic routines and security considerations for use by implementers. This specification was developed outside the IETF and does not have IETF consensus. It is published here to guide implementation of R 5 N and to ensure interoperability among implementations including the pre-existing GNUnet implementation.

DHTs are a key data structure for the construction of decentralized applications and generally provide a robust and efficient means to distribute the storage and retrieval of key-value pairs. To achieve logarithmically bounded routing performance, the data structure for managing neighbors and their metadata MUST be implemented using the k-buckets concept of [ Kademlia] as defined in Section 6.1. But, especially for more primitive approaches (such as only comparing XOR distances for all blocks in the storage), more simplistic procedures may become ineffective for large data sets and care MUST be taken to strictly bound the maximum effort expended per query.

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