A Secure and User Privacy-Preserving Searching Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

File sharing peer-to-peer networks have become quite popular of late as a new paradigm for information exchange among large number of users in the Internet. However, these networks suffer from several problems such as fake content distribution, free riding, whitewashing, poor search scalability, lack of a robust trust model and absence of user privacy protection mechanism. In this paper, a secure and efficient searching scheme for peer-to-peer networks has been proposed that utilizes topology adaptation by constructing an overlay of trusted peers where the neighbors are selected based on their trust ratings and content similarities. While increasing the search efficiency by intelligently exploiting the formation of semantic community structures among the trustworthy peers, the scheme provides a highly reliable module for protecting the privacy of the users and data in the network. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme provides efficient searching to good peers while penalizing the malicious peers by increasing their search times.