Authentication in Stealth Distributed Hash Tables

Most existing DHT algorithms assume that all nodes have equal capabilities. This assumption has previously been shown to be untrue in real deployments, where the heterogeneity of nodes can actually have a detrimental effect upon performance. In this paper, we acknowledge that nodes on the same overlay may also differ in terms of their trustworthiness. However, implementing and enforcing security policies in a network where all nodes are treated equally is a non-trivial task. We therefore extend our previous work on Stealth DHTs to consider the differentiation of nodes based on their trustworthiness rather than their capabilities alone.