Safe and Private Data Sharing with Turtle: Friends Team-Up and Beat the System

In this paper we describe Turtle, a peer-to-peer architecture for safe sharing of sensitive data. The truly revolutionary aspect of Turtle rests in its novel way of dealing with trust issues: while existing peer-to-peer architectures with similar aims attempt to build trust relationships on top of the basic, trust-agnostic, peer-to-peer overlay, Turtle takes the opposite approach, and builds its overlay on top of pre-existent trust relationships among its users. This allows both data sender and receiver anonymity, while also protecting each and every intermediate relay in the data query path. Furthermore, its unique trust model allows Turtle to withstand most of the denial of service attacks that plague other peer-to-peer data sharing networks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.