Scalable discovery of private resources

Resource discovery is fundamental to a multitude of distributed systems, including grids, web-based applications and multi-agent systems. To achieve scalability at a low cost, many researchers have turned to a peer-to-peer paradigm, leading to the development of a multitude of protocols and algorithms being developed, with implementations still lagging behind. In this paper we consider the privacy implications of peer-to-peer discovery systems and propose a framework for discovery of private resources. Furthermore, we propose and evaluate an architecture and a series of methods using distributed hash tables. Finally, we provide an implementation in the context of the OpenKnowledge project.