Methods and apparatuses are provided for facilitating access controls for digital objects stored within a peer-to-peer overlay network. A privacy-preserving method is provided for matching identities between a first peer node and a second peer node in a peer-to-peer network. Such identity matching may be used, for example, to ascertain whether the first peer node should provide access to certain digital object stored in the peer-to-peer overlay network. Rather than providing its identities in an unprotected format, the second peer may provide its identities to the first peer node in a concealed representation so as to prevent the first peer from learning about non-matching identities. Such concealed representation may be a data structure that cryptographically conceals one or more identities of the second peer node or a user of the second peer node within a shared data space of the data structure.