Kademlia with Consistency Checks as a Foundation of Borderless Collaboration in Open Science Services

The concept of Open Science emerges as a powerful new trend, allowing researchers to exchange and reuse valuable knowledge, data and analyses. Innovative tools are needed to facilitate such global scientific collaboration, which is the main objective of the Onedatasystem. It aspires to provide a Open Science platform based on openness and decentralization. To achieve this, a distributed location service must be introduced that will allow to locate resources in this vast environment. This paper identifies Kademlia DHT networks as a viable solution, which nevertheless requires improvements to be applicable in Onedata. It analyzes the consistency problems and attack resistance deficiencies of Kademlia and proposes additional consistency checks as a solution. Implications of such modifications are discussed and the modified Kademlia is compared against the original Kademlia algorithm.