General Security Concept for Embedded P2P System

The importance of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems in real-world applications has grown significantly over the last years. Although P2P systems have found their way into many fields of application, the lack of an adequate general security concept, research for specific security mechanisms and implementations of possible security improvements are still limiting factors. As a further challenge, many new P2P systems will include embedded devices, which are often severely constrained in computing power, memory size, and available energy. These restrictions will complicate the implementation of adequate security measures. In this work, we focus on an overall view of the security in such embedded P2P systems and on finding promising mechanisms and solutions to this challenging task. We propose a security concept that takes heterogeneity of peers and the constraints of embedded devices into account by offering various security-performance tradeoffs. Our concept is based on the notion of a general grouping mechanism, which allows for the secure interaction of arbitrary peers. Moreover, the critical issue of side-channel attacks is also addressed by our security concept.