A system (100) and method (500) system to authenticate a peer in a peer-to-peer network is provided. The system can include a first peer (110) to locally create a secret key (112) and use the secret key to produce a public-key pair (120) comprising an identifier name (113) and a small public-key (115), and a second peer (160) to locally authenticate the identifier name of the public-key pair by requesting (405) the first peer to produce a unique dataset that does not reveal the secret-key and yet validates that the public-key pair was generated with the secret-key when the large public-key is applied to a portion of the unique dataset without using an external authentication system.