Technical Report NDN-0023: An Endorsement-based Key Management System for Decentralized NDN Chat Application



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An Endorsement-based Key Management System for Decentralized NDN Chat Application. Yingdi Yu, Alexander Afanasyev, Zhenkai Zhu, and Lixia Zhang.
NDN, Technical Report NDN-0023, Revision 1: July 22, 2014.

In Named Data Networking (NDN), all data packets are authenticated with digital signatures. Thus a trustworthy key management system is required in all NDN applications for data validation. In this paper, we propose an endorsement-based key management system, which is inspired by the concept of Web-of-Trust, to secure ChronoChat, a serverless group chat application over NDN. With the endorsement-based key management system, users in a chatroom can collaboratively authenticate each other’s membership in the chatroom. The system also leverages the synchronization mechanism provided in ChronoChat for efficient key/endorsement distribution and revocation. We further extend the key management system for user identity authentication in a chatroom to enable one user to authenticate another user’s identity without resorting to any external public key infrastructure.