Security in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

Chapter 6 addresses security, privacy and anonymity issues. We begin this chapter with a discussion about techniques designed to secure data as well as the overall P2P environment from different types of attacks, including routing attacks, storage and retrieval attacks, and denial-of-service attacks. We then introduce solutions to guarantee integrity of data as well as computation over P2P systems. After that, we present methods that prevent users from taking advantage of the system by freeloading off the resources contributed by others. These methods are important because guaranteeing the fairness among participants and encouraging them to contribute sharing resources represent the central strength of P2P systems. Finally, we look at techniques that are designed to support anonymity and privacy, to protect both the users that disseminate the data, as well as the nodes that store the data. We also examine techniques that authenticate third-party data publication.