Security for Structured Peer-to-peer Overlay Networks

Abstract

One Ring to rule them all. One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all. And in the darkness bind them. J.R.R. Tolkien Self-organizing, structured peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay networks like CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry offer a novel platform for a variety of scalable and decentralized distributed applications. These systems provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing, object location, and load balancing within a self-organizing overlay network. One major problem with these systems is how to bootstrap them. How do you decide which overlay to join? How do you find a contact node in the overlay to join? How do you obtain the code that you should run? Current systems require that each node that participates in a given overlay supports the same set of applications, and that these applications are pre-installed on each node. In this position paper, we sketch the design of an infrastructure that uses a universal overlay to provide a scalable infrastructure to bootstrap multiple service overlays providing different functionality. It provides mechanisms to advertise services and to discover services, contact nodes, and service code. 1.