Security properties in an open peer-to-peer network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel architecture for open peer-to-peer networks that enforces security properties like confidentiality, integrity, and availability, by evaluating trust and automatically configuring security policies.

Contribution

It proposes an architecture that formalizes security requirements, assesses peer trustworthiness, and automatically enforces security policies via SELinux in peer-to-peer networks.

Findings

Formal security property definition for shared resources

Trust and reputation evaluation through challenge-response

Automatic SELinux policy configuration for security enforcement

Abstract

This paper proposes to address new requirements of confidentiality, integrity and availability properties fitting to peer-to-peer domains of resources. The enforcement of security properties in an open peer-topeer network remains an open problem as the literature have mainly proposed contribution on availability of resources and anonymity of users. That paper proposes a novel architecture that eases the administration of a peer-to-peer network. It considers a network of safe peer-to-peer clients in the sense that it is a commune client software that is shared by all the participants to cope with the sharing of various resources associated with different security requirements. However, our proposal deals with possible malicious peers that attempt to compromise the requested security properties. Despite the safety of an open peer-to-peer network cannot be formally guaranteed, since a end user has privileges on the target host, our solution provides several advanced security enforcement. First, it enables to formally define the requested security properties of the various shared resources. Second, it evaluates the trust and the reputation of the requesting peer by sending challenges that test the fairness of its peer-to-peer security policy. Moreover, it proposes an advanced Mandatory Access Control that enforces the required peer-to-peer security properties through an automatic projection of the requested properties onto SELinux policies. Thus, the SELinux system of the requesting peer is automatically configured with respect to the required peer-to-peer security properties.