Admission control in Peer-to-Peer: design and performance evaluation

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications and services are very common in today's computing. The popularity of the P2P paradigm prompts the need for specialized security services which makes P2P security an important and challenging research topic. Most prior work in P2P security focused on authentication, key management and secure communication. However, an important pre-requisite for many P2P security services is secure admission, or how one becomes a peer in a P2P setting. This issue has been heretofore largely untouched.This paper builds upon some recent work [11] which constructed a peer group admission control framework based on different policies and corresponding cryptographic techniques. Our central goal is to assess the practicality of these techniques. To this end, we construct and evaluate concrete P2P admission mechanisms based on various cryptographic techniques. Although our analysis focuses primarily on performance, we also consider other important features, such as: anonymity, unlinkability and accountability. Among other things, our experimental results demonstrate that, unfortunately, advanced cryptographic constructs (such as verifiable threshold signatures) are not yet ready for prime time.