Adding Query Privacy to Robust DHTs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to enhance privacy in distributed hash tables by protecting queried keys using oblivious transfer, ensuring key secrecy without significant performance costs.

Contribution

It presents an OT-based approach for query privacy in robust DHTs, addressing a gap in existing solutions that focus only on sender anonymity.

Findings

No increase in message complexity

Small computational overhead

Effective key privacy in DHT queries

Abstract

Interest in anonymous communication over distributed hash tables (DHTs) has increased in recent years. However, almost all known solutions solely aim at achieving sender or requestor anonymity in DHT queries. In many application scenarios, it is crucial that the queried key remains secret from intermediate peers that (help to) route the queries towards their destinations. In this paper, we satisfy this requirement by presenting an approach for providing privacy for the keys in DHT queries. We use the concept of oblivious transfer (OT) in communication over DHTs to preserve query privacy without compromising spam resistance. Although our OT-based approach can work over any DHT, we concentrate on communication over robust DHTs that can tolerate Byzantine faults and resist spam. We choose the best-known robust DHT construction, and employ an efficient OT protocol well-suited for achieving our goal of obtaining query privacy over robust DHTs. Finally, we compare the performance of our privacy-preserving protocols with their more privacy-invasive counterparts. We observe that there is no increase in the message complexity and only a small overhead in the computational complexity.