Does Chord/DHash protect against malicious users?
No and sort-of. Security in distributed rendezvous protocols like Chord is still an open research question (2005), though some early results are discussed in the Proceedings of the first IPTPS. DHash provides integrity protection of data by restricting IDs used to be the output of a cryptographic hash of the data or a public-key signature. However, it does not protect against denial of service attacks where malicious nodes interfere with routing.
