Scalable byzantine fault tolerant public key authentication for peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication model has the potential to harness huge amounts of resources. However, due to the self-organizing and self-maintaining nature, current P2P networks suffer from various kinds of attacks. Public key authentication can provide a fundamental building block for P2P communication security. In this paper, we propose a scalable Byzantine fault tolerant public key authentication scheme for P2P networks, in which each participating peer dynamically maintains a trusted group to perform distributed challenge-response authentication without centralized infrastructure. To guarantee the authentication correctness, we additionally present a complementary trusted group maintenance scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that our authentication scheme can work in various different P2P scenarios effectively and efficiently. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.