Comment A worthy adversary! (Score 1) 7
One of the most salient features of KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia (PDF), a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers.
For the unaware, distributed hash tables (DHT) are regularly used for file-sharing applications, not the distribute files but to find other computers that are sharing files. The downside of DHT is that it's "slow" meaning it can take several minutes for a message to permeate the network.
Far too often, it seems like cyber criminals are too dumb to be effective because you almost never hear about P2P infrastructure when it comes to botnets. They just keep putting up obvious C&C points that just get taken down, time and time again. When I read this exact paper years ago, it seemed obvious to me that this was the perfect to improve the resiliency for secret/illegal networks. Despite that, it's almost never used!
Don't get me wrong, they'll still get taken down but it will be more of a challenge.