Likir: Layered Identity-based Kademlia InfRastructure

Likir is the infrastructure of a new structured Peer-to-Peer network (DHT) based on Kademlia that poses the user identity at the heart of its architectural design. The goal of Likir is to provide a simple, secure and general purpose framework to develop distributed identity-based applications and to make easier the integration between them. Likir defines a middleware placed between application and overlay network that offers functionalities for user identity management, so that the user identity could be portable between different applications layered on Likir. Sharing the same identity management system allows to easily integrate different applications in order to create more complex structured services; this happens because every content stored in the DHT is indissolubly bound to its publisher, so that retrieving a content inserted from another application of the same user is very easy. Likir has the potential to denote a real social network, in which each user interacts with others, through an extensible suite of custom applications, on the basis of the reciprocal knowledge of their identity. In addition, the Likir’s architectural scheme and interaction protocol are designed to make the network much more resistant than the existing DHT networks to the most notorious and dangerous cyber-attacks.