Wheel of Trust: A Secure Framework for Overlay-Based Services

The recent advances of distributed hash tables (DHTs) facilitate the development of highly scalable and robust network applications and services. However, with applications and services each employing their own DHTs that perform essentially the same tasks, an open infrastructure providing the core DHT functionalities for these applications and services would represent a cost-effective solution. In this paper we present a generic secure framework for deploying secure overlay-based applications/services. We combine DHTs and identity-based encryption (IBE) to develop a novel architecture that is scalable and robust against man-in-the-middle attacks. We also develop an innovative mechanism called "Wheel of Trust" that secures our framework against insider attacks. Based on the proposed architecture, we present some preliminary evaluation results from a prototype implementation.