A comparison analysis of trust-adaptive approaches to deliver signed public keys in P2P systems

Abstract

An important and common prerequisite of many asymmetric cryptography systems is the availability of a secure mechanism for exchanging or distributing public keys. In this paper we compare two adaptive trust-based distributed schemes to deliver public keys in a peer-to-peer network. In such a scenario, centralized solutions, for example based on a certification authority or a public key infrastructure, cannot be used. For this reason we considered a completely distributed approach creating a sort of context aware web-of-trust. This is achieved in two different trust-based manners: one considering a classic request-response scheme and another one that exploits a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). We compare performances of both solutions trying to find an optimum trade-off.