[p2p-hackers] p2p sharing & access-control

Bert bert at web2peer.com
Wed Sep 17 09:29:43 PDT 2003


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.
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Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences:
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