P2P: Unique Design Challenges in Accountability and Security

P2P system is defined as: As an interaction model that facilitates sophisticated resource sharing environments between ”consenting” peers.

Motivation There are several design issues such as Search protocols, Mechanisms used for data transfer, Reliability and fault tolerance of the system. P2P system expects all the participants to work for the common good of the system. It is this aspect that poses design challenges and makes P2P design interesting .

Issues / Challenges Accountability Accountability is unique to P2P systems. A mechanism that makes the users accountable for their activity in the network in terms of the resources that they utilize. Here resources could range anything from cycles , storage, files.. Security Secondly we want any system that we design to be secure. But in P2p there are security issues that crop up, because the system is usually made of community based individual peers, unlike in the case of say grid computing.

Security Breaches Typical security breaches include the following. 1. DOS: Denial of service attack 2. Interoperability 3. Unreliable Transport 4. Variable Membership 5. Data tampering

Plan of Action Step 1: Compile the state-of- the -art mechanisms to guarantee accountability. Step 2: Compile the state-of- the -art mechanisms for avoiding security breaches. I am not quite done with compiling this .

Contribution I hope to compile open questions in this area and consequently the research directions. More importantly, one thing that I have noticed is that design issues especially accountability and security have always been treated in isolation. As a contribution the paper makes an attempt of bringing the 2 issues together, by bringing to the forefront some of the issues caused by isolation. This exercise has been helpful in pinpointing open problems and research directions.

PROGRESS: 1. Compiling my findings into a document. 2. I still have to make connections to seemingly disconnected pieces. 3. I have just put down my thoughts on what my presentation should look like.