Decentralized Bootstrapping for WebRTC-based P2P Networks

Around the millennium, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks were standalone applications, where users had to configure their firewalls properly to be able to connect to the network. Nowadays, P2P connections between browsers are possible without the need for any user-side configuration. This can be achieved with the Web Real-Time Communication protocol stack (WebRTC). Recent research showed that WebRTC-based peer-to-peer networks can work as a decentralized, redundant and encrypted storage for user data. However, all existing networks employ a centralized bootstrapping infrastructure, which still is a single point of failure. In this paper, we present a decentralized architecture to handle bootstrapping for a WebRTC-based peer-to-peer network, completely removing the need for a central instance. The architecture uses the highly decentralized Domain Name System (DNS), combined with so-called Master-Peers. Our evaluation shows that the architecture scales well and reduces the bootstrapping time remarkably.