One of my recent interests has been p2p file sharing in an access-controlled environment instead of the current "free for all" paradigm. This area is deserving of attention because of obvious applications in p2p for the enterprise as well as emerging "darknets" intended to be invitation only. The question I've been thinking about is how to support (efficient) search in such settings. Currently, when we search for access controlled files we must individually authenticate and search each relevant repository. But in a massively distributed environment, how do you know what repositories are relevant? And even if you did, searching all of them independently would be too much trouble. An alternative is to have every information provider allow its content to be indexed by a centralized index host, but the trust & security requirements of such a host would be too high to be practical. We've written a paper that addresses this problem and proposes an alternative solution. The idea is to build a specialized index structure that does not reveal any specific details about the content being shared. As such it is suitable for storage on untrusted nodes, e.g. typical (super) peers in a p2p network. The paper is entitled "Privacy-Preserving Indexing of Documents on the Network", and you can download it from here: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/bayardo/userv/ Hope you find it interesting. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- ----- End forwarded message ----- [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]