Experimenting with Admission Control in P2P

Peer-to-peer (P2P) security has received a lot of attention as of late. Most prior work focused almost entirely on issues related to secure communication, such as key management and peer authentication. However, an important pre-requisite for secure communication – secure peer admission – has been neither recognized nor adequately addressed. Only very recently, some initial work began to make inroads into this difficult problem. In particular, [1] constructed a peer group admission control framework based on various admission policies matched with appropriate cryptographic techniques. Recent results [2], [3] also illustrate the design of, and experiments with, certain group admission control mechanisms. In this work, we report on the implementation of Bouncer, an experimental peer group admission control toolkit used in [2] and its trial integration with two peer group systems with very different goals and semantics: Gnutella and Secure Spread. We also discuss some outstanding issues, challenges and future research directions relevant to this topic.