Multicast seemed the only possible technique for one/many-to-many content distribution over many years. However we never had a world-wide content distribution network based on multicasting excluding some small and preconfigured networks such as mbone. Fortunately, today we have lots of content distribution networks such as gnutella, BitTorrent, eDonkey and Napster. All of these networks are bui...

The limitations of client/server systems become evident in an Internetscale distributed environment. P2P systems offer an alternative to traditional client/server systems: Every node acts both as a client and a server and “pays” its participation by providing access to its computing resources. Systems such as Napster and Gnutella have proven their practical applicability. In this article we bri...

The advent of grassroots content distribution systems (e.g., Gnutella, FreeNet, Napster, Oceanstore) indicates the need for a distributed data location algorithm [HBMKK00, Cla00, Fan00, K+00a]. In this paper we investigate three methods of data location: distance-vector routing and link-state vector routing using Bloom filters, and a naive cache sharing algorithm. These data location methods ar...

In 1990, John Perry Barlow described the Internet as the “electronic frontier”, a new world “unspoiled, self-governing and best left to inhabitants to run as they pleas[e].” Utopian visions of the Internet, like Barlow’s, saw this new technology as a way to connect people like never before, and the potential to start new societies beyond the control of government and the confines of territorial...

The peer-to-peer computing model is not new, but has recently become a commonplace among the average computer user due to the introduction of applications like Napster and Gnutella. Along with the freedom of connecting peer-to-peer come security risks. In response to some of these security risks, Intel has released a code library that software developers can use to strengthen the security of, a...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have been widely used for content sharing, popularly called “file-swapping” networks. This chapter gives a broad overview of content sharing P2P technologies. It starts with the fundamental concept of P2P computing followed by the analysis of network topologies used in peer-to-peer systems. Next, three milestone peer-to-peer technologies: Napster, Gnutella, and F...

Recent developments have seen the closure of P2P sites such as Kazaa and Napster due to legal action, and a subsequent rise in the use of alternative file-sharing software, namely BitTorrent. This research in progress aims to evaluate the effectiveness of commercial programs to erase traces of the use of such software. The erasure programs Privacy Suite, Window Washer and R-Clean and Wipe were ...

As computing and communication capabilities have continued to increase, more and more activity is taking place at the edges of the network, typically in homes or on workers desktops. This trend has been demonstrated by the increasing popularity and usability of \peer-to-peer" systems such as Napster and Gnutella. Unfortunately, this popularity has quickly shown the limitations of these systems,...

In structured Peer-to-Peer(P2P) systems such as Chord or Pastry, each node plays an equal role and has the same responsibility. The most important advantage of such approach is scalability: since there are no centralized resources in the system, the system can easily scale to millions of nodes. However, we need to pay a high price for such scalability, as the maintenance cost of such protocols ...