Methods and apparatuses are provided for facilitating group access controls in peer-to-peer or other similar overlay networks. A group administrator may create a group in the overlay network and may assign peer-specific certificates to each member of the group for indicating membership in the group. A group member peer node can access data objects in the overlay network using its respective peer-specific certificate to authenticate itself as a group member. The authentication is performed by another peer node in the network. The validating peer node can authenticate that the group member is the rightful possessor of the peer-specific certificate using a public key associated with the peer node to which the peer-specific certificate was issued. The validating peer node can also validate that the peer-specific certificate was properly issued to the group member using a public key of the apparatus that issued the peer-specific certificate.