Efficient content authentication in peer-to-peer networks

We study a new model for data authentication over peer-to-peer (p2p) storage networks, where data items are stored, queried and authenticated in a totally decentralized fashion. The model captures the security requirements of emerging distributed computing applications. We present an efficient construction of a distributed Merkle tree (DMT), which realizes an authentication tree over a p2p network, thus extending a fundamental cryptographic technique to distributed environments. We show how our DMT can be used to design an authenticated distributed hash table that is secure against replay attacks and consistent with the update history. Our scheme is built on top of a broad class of existing p2p overlay networks and achieves generality by using only the basic functionality of object location. We use this scheme to design the first efficient distributed authenticated dictionary.