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Hiding user content interest while preserving P2P performance

Published: 24 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The lack of privacy in P2P systems is an inherent characteristic of their design, as users have to expose their content interests. A variety of solutions have been proposed, offering several levels of protection to its users, from privacy to complete anonymity, but always at the cost of performance. However, most P2P users are reluctant to trade performance for privacy. In this paper we present a novel P2P system that hides user content interest without affecting performance. Our solution uses cover traffic in order to hide the user interests while improving the performance of the system. The cover traffic and performance benefits are provided through several techniques, such as caching, sub-announcing, relaying requests, and creating private swarms. We show that our system hides the real interests of a user from third parties, providing plausible deniability. We describe its design and implement it as an enhancement of the upcoming IETF P2P Streaming Protocol Internet standard. Our solution offers backwards compatibility and can also be integrated in other similar P2P protocols. Analysis of possible attacks shows that only an adversary who controls a very high percentage of the peers in the system can infer the content interest of the user, but even then, without complete certainty. Furthermore, using actual P2P client software, we show that our privacy enhancements do not lead to a performance loss.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)Mistrustful P2P: Privacy-preserving file sharing over untrustworthy Peer-to-Peer networks2016 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2016.7497223(395-403)Online publication date: May-2016

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '14: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2014
1890 pages
ISBN:9781450324694
DOI:10.1145/2554850
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 24 March 2014

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Author Tags

  1. P2P
  2. distributed caching
  3. privacy

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SAC 2014
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SAC 2014: Symposium on Applied Computing
March 24 - 28, 2014
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea

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SAC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 218 of 939 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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View all
  • (2016)Mistrustful P2P: Privacy-preserving file sharing over untrustworthy Peer-to-Peer networks2016 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2016.7497223(395-403)Online publication date: May-2016

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