Couldn't you use usernames as keys into a DHT that contains the users' public keys (perhaps a parallel DHT to the one that you already have that does service lookups)? Of course you'd have to have some way to resolve namespace clashes, maybe using a petname scheme? And you'd have to figure out how to discourage malicious poisoning of username keys to public key values, but you'd have to do that in a centralized architecture, too.
BTW, when you say that posession of the user's public key allows you to get a VNC connection, you're talking about an pre-authenticated session, right? When I first read your description, it sounded like all one needed was the user's public key, and they'd have free reign on that user's box. ;) Alen On 6/23/06, K.S.Sreeram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi All As I had mentioned in my earlier post, I'm working on a decentralized communication system, where every user is identified by his RSA key. A DHT is used to map the user's public key to his network location (ip address). A user's contact list basically is just a list of public keys. It has a pretty easy to use GUI, where I can just right click on any contact and choose 'Remote Desktop', and I get a secure NAT/firewall friendly VNC session established. Similarly secure chat and filetransfer are available too. One of the biggest stumbling blocks that will hinder mass adoption of this product is the fact that users need to manually exchange their public keys (e.g thru email), before they can communicate with each other. I'm at a loss of ideas on how to tackle this problem. Right now i'm contemplating having a central key-server (some what like pgp key servers), which is used to fetch public keys when a user adds contacts. This is probably the simplest approach, but it does break the technical purity of a 'completely decentralized system'. Does anybody have any ideas on how this ease-of-use problem can be solved? Regards Sreeram _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences
_______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences
