Facilitating access control in peer-to-peer overlay networks

摘要

Methods and apparatuses are provided for facilitating access controls for digital objects stored within a peer-to-peer overlay network. A privacy-preserving method is provided for matching identities between a first peer node and a second peer node in a peer-to-peer network. Such identity matching may be used, for example, to ascertain whether the first peer node should provide access to certain digital object stored in the peer-to-peer overlay network. Rather than providing its identities in an unprotected format, the second peer may provide its identities to the first peer node in a concealed representation so as to prevent the first peer from learning about non-matching identities. Such concealed representation may be a data structure that cryptographically conceals one or more identities of the second peer node or a user of the second peer node within a shared data space of the data structure.

主权项

1. A method operational in a requesting peer node, comprising:
generating a first data structure that cryptographically conceals one or more identities of the requesting peer node or a user of the requesting peer node within a shared data space of the first data structure, wherein a representation of each of the one or more identities is uniformly and randomly distributed along the shared data space; and sending the first data structure to a validating peer node as part of a request to access a digital object stored by the validating peer node, wherein the digital object is accessible to the requesting peer node if the one or more identities of the requesting peer node match corresponding one or more identities of the validating peer node by sending authentication data corresponding to the matching access identity to the validating peer node.