> My knowledge of the field is pretty spotty in general as I've never paid much > attention up until now -- mostly I know about how people have built DHTs in > non-hostile environments. I'm close enough to starting from scratch that I don't > know yet what I don't know.
I studied such systems intensely, and designed some (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Name_Resolution_Protocol). Using a distributed hash table securely is really hard. The basic idea of DHT is that information is spread on the network based on matches between the hash of a resource identifier and the hash of a node identifier. All nodes are effectively relying on every other node. In an open network, that is pretty much equivalent to "relying on the goodness of strangers." You can be sure that if our buddies at the NSA set up to watch the content of a DHT, they will succeed. -- Christian Huitema _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
