MAILLE AUTHENTICATION A NovelProtocolfor DistributedAuthentication

We present a decentralized solution to the distributed authentication problem. Unlike current schemes, Maille does not rely on a set of dedicated servers. Each participating node has a set of trusted peers that aet as replicated repositories for its public key. Whenever anode A wants to contact another node B, it sends messages to its peers, which forward them to their peers, and so on until they reach B's peers. These peers then reply with B's public key and return them back through the paths the requests originally took. To guarantee the independence of replies, each node along each path forwards one reply only. Because of this, each Byzantine failure can introduce at most one false response. If the same key value is asserted by a qualified quorum of replies, A accepts it as the true key ofB. Otherwise authentieation fails.