Documentation #37
Description
In my opinion, the documentation (README) fails to succinctly explain what this distributed hash table is and what it is not. For instance, it does not explain how authentication and encryption is achieved. From what I read there is the concept of a topic that allows peers to discover the subset of the network that interests them. A mutable put request requires a signature to ensure that updates can only be issued by a node possessing the corresponding private key. However, the relation between this announced topic the put and get requests is not explained.
I fail to see how the network can filter what nodes are allowed to join and how the communication within the network is encrypted. Can nodes of the network discover topics by just sifting through the traffic going through them? Can eavesdroppers do the same? Can they then join topics they were not supposed to know about? Do you rely on another layer to provide authentication and encryption (VPN?). Is it sufficient to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table to understand what this package achieves? Is this DHT only suitable for public data? I am lost.