Authentication in Peer-to-Peer Network: Survey and Research Directions

Authentication and access control are the two main aspects of the security of P2P. Due to the semi-trusted nature of P2P network, authentication plays an important role in identification of the network user, authenticity and integrity of information-sharing. In this paper, we analyze the current P2P network authentication technologies and their shortages from two aspects: the identity and the text contents. We make conclusions that the "decentralized, semi-credible and dynamic nature" of P2P makes the problems of certificate management and key escrow to be especially outstanding, so that the traditional public-key cryptosystems including PKI and ID-PKC are very difficult to be applied in the P2P networks. For this reason, this paper proposes a P2P authentication technology based on CL-PKC (certificateless public key cryptograph) and further points out the key issues need to be studied.