Towards Securing Communications in Infrastructure-Poor Areas

Structured P2P networks have proven to be effective in the exchange of data between nodes whose identity and content are generally indexed in a DHT. For years, such DHT networks have allowed, among other users, third world inhabitants, such as African people, to exchange information among them and with the rest of the world without relying on a centralized infrastructure. Unfortunately, more than ever, reliability of communication across the Internet is threatened by various attacks, including usurpation of identity, eavesdropping or traffic modification. Thus, in order to overcome these security issues and allow peers to securely exchange data, we propose a new key management scheme that enables to handle public keys in the absence of a central coordination which would be required in a traditional PKI.