Cryptography enhanced ad-hoc approach to P2P overlays
Michal Zima, Eva Hladká · 2016
We address the problem of a secure direct communication of two arbitrary peers in a P2P network without knowing each other's IP addresses. An efficient solution to this problem will provide a practically usable way of communication to privacy-sensitive P2P applications. Traditionally, P2P architectures view this problem as a problem of mutual anonymity of a message sender and receiver, but usual solutions suffer from various inefficiencies or complexities. By looking at the problem from a perspective of an ad-hoc network, we are able to apply a familiar approach of multihop communication and ad-hoc routing algorithms to a P2P overlay. Introduced usage of a public key as a node's identifier adds further security features, including data integrity through digital signatures, or end-to-end encryption. Proposed P2P overlay has been successfully used for building a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange Coincer.