k-rAC - a Fine-Grained k-Resilient Access Control Scheme for Distributed Hash Tables
This addresses privacy issues in decentralized applications by enabling controlled access in DHTs, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of uncontrolled access in Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) for privacy-aware applications by introducing k-rAC, a fine-grained access control scheme, and shows it introduces acceptable overhead.
Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) are a common architecture for decentralized applications and, therefore, would be suited for privacy-aware applications. However, currently existing DHTs allow every peer to access any index. To build privacy-aware applications, we need to control this access. In this paper, we present k-rAC, a privacy-aware fine-grained AC for DHTs. For authentication, we present three different mechanisms based on public-key cryptography, zero-knowledge-proofs, and cryptographic hashes. For authorization, we use distributed AC lists. The security of our approach is based on k-resilience. We show that our approach introduces an acceptable overhead and discuss its suitability for different scenarios.