Proposal and performance evaluation of Hash-based authentication for P2P network

Recently, P2P networks have been evolving rapidly. Efficient authentication of P2P network nodes remains a difficult task. As described herein, we propose an authentication method called Hash-based Distributed Authentication Method (HDAM), which realizes a decentralized efficient mutual authentication mechanism for each pair of nodes in a P2P network. It performs distributed management of public keys using Web of Trust and a Distributed Hash Table. The scheme markedly reduces both the memory size requirement and the overhead of communication data sent by the nodes. Simulation results show that HDAM can reduce the required memory size by up to 95%. Furthermore, the results show that HDAM is more scalable than the conventional method: the communication overhead of HDAM is O(log p).