Self-destructing Instant Messages by Employing KAD DHT Network
Yuhui Deng, Zhen Zhang, Zhike Chen, Lijuan Lu · 2015
Privacy protection is becoming more and more important due to the ubiquitous access to information. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are widely used by peer-to-peer networks with more than one million concurrently active users. This paper proposes and designs a web based self-Destructing Instant Messenger (DIM) on eMule KAD DHT network in China without any involvement of users and trusted systems, thus protecting the privacy of instant messages. Comprehensive experiments are performed to evaluate the features of eMule KAD DHT network and analyze the impacts of the features on the DIM. Experimental results reveal that the lifespan of data objects in the eMule KAD network in China is much shorter than that defined by the KAD protocol, and the pattern of eMule peers in China has a significant impact on the behavior of DIM. Furthermore, an approach of prstoring subkeys is designed to eliminate the overhead involved in the distribution and retrieving of subkeys, thus optimizing the performance of DIM.