Decentralized Trust in Distributed Networks: a Delegate -based Security Hardening Approach

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are well defined in their communicating and collaborating mechanisms – search, share, and retrieve information – especially when there is a centralized management server. However, these operations provide no convenient security mechanisms for serverless networks. This paper examines a security hardening approach to limit or prevent identifier attacks between distributed P2P networking nodes without help from a centralized server. This paper introduces the basic concept of security hardening and discusses how it can be realized in distributed P2P networks. This paper provides a brief review of a relevant work from the literature. It is a method of a peer to create a cryptographic ‘trust binding’ with a remote peer easily and instantly without any help of a centralized manager or server, with which the first peer can interpret the cryptographic binding as its trust upon the remote peer. Because the scheme combines peers identifier to the generated trust binding, an attacker cannot do much harm (like misrouting, corrupting, or dropping communication data transferred between the first and the second peer) to the peers, without breaking the binding. Also presented is a detailed analytic study of the security hardening approach from which the strength of the scheme is discussed. Our analysis shows that once implemented the security hardening can be an important countermeasure against various identifier related attacks in distributed P2P networks.