Structured P2P Networks like Chord, Pastry, CAN provide scalable and guaranteed lookup of data, a feature especially missing in traditional Gnutella type P2P networks. However, this comes at an expense of losing the level of limited anonymity that has slowly become synonymous with P2P systems. Also, with the growth of internet based services, privacy has become a very critical user concern and users - both service requesters and service providers - prefer to stay anonymous. So while in one direction, we are moving towards better performing P2P systems, we are also losing out an essential component of today's computing.
In our research, we have tried to bridge this gap. We have built a complete anonymizing infrastructure over structured P2P systems, which provides mutual anonymity for both service requester and service provider and still maintains the important benefits of scalable and guaranteed lookup of the structured systems. Agyaat is as scalable as traditional structured P2P systems in both number of hops and aggregate messages transmitted, differing only by constants. We achieve this by adding-on small Gnutella type topologies (called clouds) over the underlying structured overlay and provide novel routing mechanisms to let messages reach appropriate peers without giving up their identity.
Aameek Singh
Bugra Gedik
Ling Liu
Aameek Singh, Bugra Gedik, Ling Liu, "Agyaat: Mutual Anonymity over Structured P2P Networks ", In Emerald Internet Research Journal (Special Issue on Privacy and Anonymity in the Digital Era), Volume-16, Issue-2, 2006.
Aameek Singh, Ling Liu, "A Hybrid Topology Architecture for P2P Systems", Proceedings of the thirteenth International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), October 2004. |Slides|
Well, Agyaat means "anonymous" in Hindi and fits (has been made to ;) to Add-on topoloGY for mutuAl AnonymiTy.
H. Tsai and A. Harwood, "A Scalable Anonymous Server Overlay Network", 20th IEEE Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2006. [html]
Vasilios Darlagiannis, "Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Systems", Chapter in "Peer-to-Peer Systems and Applications", LNCS 3485, 2005. [html]
G. Ciaccio, "Evaluating Sender and Recipient Anonymity in a Structured Overlay", Technical Report DISI-TR-05-13, University of Genova, October 2005. [pdf]
"The Multicast QoS Middleware and the QoS Overlay Network", EuQoS Consortium, University of Berne [ppt]
Survey Paper on File Sharing in P2P Networks by Vamsi Venigalla, NCSU [pdf]
Aameek Singh <aameek[AT]aameeksingh.com>
This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under a CNS Grant, an ITR grant, a Research Infrastructure grant, and a DoE SciDAC grant, an IBM SUR grant, an IBM faculty award, and an HP equipment grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommend ations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or DoE.
© 2007 Aameek Singh