This is a variation of the s/kademlia Distributed Hashtable specification. It was forked from the implementation created by Libp2p at (https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p-kad-dht).

This version of s/kad:

• Uses Ulixee Identities as kad node identifiers (ed25519 kpi).
• Does not include a specification for put/getting values on the kad. It is only for node discovery and publishing "provider" capability.
• Discovery is exclusively via bootstrap peer lists (host/nodeId)
• All kad keys are sha256. Nodes are looked up in the kad using a sha256 of the underlying Ed25519 public key.
• Kad connections must prove public key ownership on connection (Kad.connect + Kad.verify). A nonce exchange + kpi signature is used for forward secrecy.
• All encryption is expected to be applied at the containing transport level (ie, server ssl)
• Transport serialization uses JSON with embedded type information (@ulixee/commons/lib/TypeSerializer).

Future work:

• This KAD should move to WebTransport as soon as available to fix head of line blocking with the websockets and add multiplexing over a single socket. It allows for self-signed certificates for ips, which are a good fit for a decentralized network.
• Add api rate limiting + bad actor ip lists.
• Add a "puzzle" or other difficulty mechanism to creating a network id. Possibly this is difficulty in the nonce in the verify step - although, we might want to allow the node to reuse the hash for some period of time.