Secure Thyself: Securing Individual Peers in Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Environments

P2P networks and the computations that they enable hold great potential in designing the next generation of very-large scale distributed applications. However, the P2P phenomenon has largely left untouched large organizations and business which have stringent security requirements and are uncomfortable with the anonymity, lack of centralized control and censorship, which are the norm in P2P systems. Hence, there is an urgent need to address the security concerns in deploying P2P systems which can leverage the under-utilized resources in millions of organizations across the world. This paper proposes a novel containment-based security model for cycle-stealing P2P applications, based on the Secure Linux (SE Linux) Operating System, which alleviates existing security concerns, allowing peers to host untrusted or even hostile applications. The model is based on securing individual peers rather than computing trust/reputation metrics for the thousands of peers in a typical P2P network, which involves significant computational overheads.