Achord: A Variant of the Chord Lookup Service for Use in Censorship Resistant Peer−to−Peer Publishing Systems

Any peer−to−peer publishing system must provide a mechanism for efficiently locating published documents. For censorship resistant systems, it is particularly important that the lookup mechanism be difficult to disable or abuse. Chord is a promising distributed lookup mechanism, because analysis has provided certain useful guarantees about the speed and correctness of Chord's operation. The authors examine the suitability of Chord for building censorship resistant peer−to−peer publishing systems, and suggest Achord, a variant of the Chord mechanism which takes into account the additional requirements imposed by the goal of censorship resistance.