[p2p-hackers] Ways of enforcing "property rights" for data published to a DHT

[Enzo Michelangeli]

>From what I understand of Overnet's implementation of Kademlia, any record
published by a peer can be easily overwritten by any other peer if the
latter publishes a different record with the same key and the same
"secondary hash" (the "data" part in Overnet comprises another 128-bit
string -- what I call "secondary hash" -- and an optional dictionary of
<tagname, tagvalue> pairs).

I wonder if other DHT's implement mechanisms to make a record protected
from being overwritten by unauthorized parties. A simple way could be
based on adding to the data an unguessable "cookie" (say, another 128-bit
string with randoly-generated content) that would be stored in the DHT but
NOT returned as result of a successful search; republishing a record with
a different dictionary would result in the replacement of one previously
existing ONLY if also the cookie were the same. Unfortunately this
improvement cannot be put in place while preserving interoperability with
the existing Overnet network, but I wonder if and how other DHT's have
tackled this issue.

Enzo