SECURE IDENTITY MANAGEMENT IN STRUCTURED PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) NETWORKS

Abstract

Along with the advancing Internet technology and the continuous growth of
network applications, P2P networks, characterized by decentralization,
autonomy and anonymity, have been applied to many areas such as file sharing
and instant messaging, blockchain. Existing P2P networks which have been
widely used include BitTorrent, Gnutella, eDonkey, and so on. In P2P systems, all
nodes are equal or peers and they can either act as client or server. Due to the
lake of centralizing authority, structured overlay networks are vulnerable to
various attacks. So the security issues in the p2p networks should be considered
more carefully. The paper proposes a solution for assigning security identification
through a number of techniques using public keys and solving authentication
puzzles and building an ACS hierarchical access authentication system. The goal
is to prevent Sybil attacks so that each node joining the network is given a
unique and secure identifier, minimizing the use of fake identifiers to attack on
Chord_DHT.