Secure and Mobile P2P File Sharing

In today’s Internet, a major portion of the total traffic is generated by peer-to-peer applications such as Skype and BitTorrent. The amount of this traffic has been increasing since the beginning of this decade. At the same time, mobile use of the Internet has become even more popular. New mobile phones enable people to surf the web and read their mails wherever they are. However, for some reason, mobile peer-to-peer networks have yet to manifest themselves. This paper studies the special requirements of mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. We discuss how the limited resources of mobile devices affect the application design and network architecture choices. We also focus on the security and privacy aspects of mobile P2P networks. Functionality of P2P networks can be divided into two parts, into content location, and into content download. Security needs of both of these are dealt separately in this paper. Additionally, availability and anonymity requirements of hybrid P2P networks are considered. Finally, we propose security enhancements for our Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based mobile P2P architecture that enable secure searches and downloads in mobile P2P environment.