Distributed ONS and its impact on privacy

The EPC Network is an industry proposal to build a global information architecture for objects carrying RFID tags with Electronic Product Codes (EPC). A so-called Object Naming Service (ONS) is used to locate information sources for these objects in the EPC Network. But ONS is based on DNS, which suffers from well-studied weaknesses in robustness, configuration complexity and security. There are promising approaches to enhance the performance and robustness of DNS by using structured P2P systems based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) that have a high potential as a replacement for ONS as well. We investigate if and how a decentralized alternative to ONS based on DHT could additionally offer data access control and enhance the privacy of its clients. As it turns out, the strength of privacy protection will slightly increase by using DHT compared to DNS, but strong protection will depend on the feasibility of secure out-of-band key distribution mechanisms.