Abstract There're (several?) BitTorrent-specific DHT's, and the P2P anonymity protocols (such as GNUnet) seem to (effectively) implement their own DHT's. But is there any kind of a b universalb (i. e., transport protocol-independent) DHT? And if not, why? Searching by content-derived identifiers There're currently a number of P2P-friendly content-derived resource identifiers, such as the BitTorrent b infohashb values (which can be embedded within magnet: schema URI's, like [1]), as well as the URI's used in GNUnet and Freenet frameworks (like [2]), both non-standard (and the GNUnet ones are, as it seems, interpreting the base URI specification in somewhat an odd way.) What seems to be missing, however, is a b genericb DHT network that could be used to search both the relevant metadata (such as .torrent or Metalink files), and the peers participating in a particular data exchange (and the respective protocols they support), using one or more of an extensible set of identifiers (including BitTorrent infohashes, GNUnet URI's, and the plain SHA-1, SHA-2, or SHA-3 values.) How's it useful? With such a DHT, Alice, having only a bandwidth-limited Internet connection, could compute a SHA-256 of a large file on her host, and send the former to Bob, which, in turn, would use any downloading software (implementing the support for the aforementioned b genericb DHT) to discover the possible sources for the file in question and retrieve it. Security issues As for the security, the b recordsb in such a table could be digitally signed, with the set of the b trustedb public keys being comprised of those keys explicitly approved by the user, the public keys of the peers with which a successful data exchange has occurred before, and the public keys trusted by the peers already trusted, up to a certain depth. (There could then be different levels of trust, just like, e. g., in GnuPG, and perhaps other OpenPGP software.) The purpose of such a facility is exactly to allow for the use of (non-piecewise) digest to metadata records, which otherwise could easily be spoofed, and used to force the downloader to spend its resources to download an otherwise irrelevant data. The question The question is: are there any designs, either implemented, or described in detail, allowing for operation as described above, or are there specific reasons for which the outline above is not feasible to implement? TIA. [1] magnet:?xt=urn:btih:fb5c0d7946469ba48121607458e360cb31336e55 [2] gnunet://ecrs/chk/9E4MDN4VULE8KJG6U1C8FKH5HA8C5CHSJTILRTTPGK8MJ6VHORERHE68JU8Q0FDTOH1DGLUJ3NLE99N0ML0N9PIBAGKG7MNPBTT6UKG.1I823C58O3LKS24LLI9KB384LH82LGF9GUQRJHACCUINSCQH36SI4NF88CMAET3T3BHI93D4S0M5CC6MVDL1K8GFKVBN69Q6T307U6O.17992 -- FSF associate member #7257 _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE