A New Authentication Method with Distributed Hash Table for P2P Network

In recent years, P2P networks have been evolving at a rapid pace. Authentication of nodes in P2P networks, however, remains a difficult task to conduct efficiently. In this paper, we therefore propose a new authentication method called hash-based distributed authentication method (HDAM). HDAM realizes a decentralized efficient mutual authentication mechanism for each pair of nodes in the P2P network. It performs a distributed management of public keys by using Web of trust and distributed hash table. Our proposal significantly reduces both the memory size requirement and the overhead of communication data sent by the nodes.