Enhancement for Security of Peer-to-Peer by Expanding CGA Mechanism

Abstract

In the conventional peer-to-peer(P2P) systems, security was not important, since P2P applications were used in the private networks. Recently, the use of P2P applications is growing dramatically, in particular, for sharing large video/audio files and software in the public networks. Hence, in this paper, we propose a scheme to enhance the security of P2P systems, particularly on a peer’s authentication. We expand the Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA) mechanism to provide the peer’s authentication. In the proposed scheme, we define a new identifier made by IP address and peer’s public key to secure the peer and exchanging messages. The identifier is an expanded CGA used in application level. The P2P applications applying the proposed scheme will be secured, since the identifier and public key algorithm provide authentication of peers and messages. We analyze security threats of P2P systems and show how the proposed scheme protects the network from those threats.

This research was supported by the MIC(Ministry of Information and Communication), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA(Institute of Information Technology Advancement) (IITA-2006-C1090-0603-0027).