EAGER: Secure Peer-to-peer Data Management

University Of Texas At Dallas, Richardson TX

Investigators

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have increased in popularity partly because they can be implemented atop a diverse collection of hardware and software, making them relatively inexpensive to deploy and maintain. The network infrastructure also tends to be highly fault-tolerant, and bandwidth and other computational resources tend to be well balanced across peers, making the network highly robust. In practice, many P2P networks remain vulnerable to denial of service attacks because the homogeneity of the network results in greater interdependence among hosts. Many existing P2P networks also suffer from serious data integrity vulnerabilities because it is easy for peers in the network to lie to other peers about the data they serve. The confidentiality desired by P2P users typically comes in two forms: Data confidentiality policies prohibit the leaking of high confidentiality, shared objects to low-privileged peers, while user anonymity policies prohibit the divulging of a user?s private information. Trusted data management is a key layer in providing environments for trusted collaboration. The team will use their secure P2P infrastructure with low level security enforcement mechanisms as a basis for developing a reputation-based trust management system to enforce discretionary access control. They will provide a comprehensive solution for the design and development of secure data management hosted on a peer to peer network, focused on query processing in such an environment with considerations for confidentiality, integrity, and trust.