Really Simple Security for P2P Dissemination of Really Simple Syndication

Abstract

Using peer-to-peer overlays to notify users whenever a new update occurs is a promising approach to support web based publish subscribe systems like RSS. Such a peer-to-peer approach can scale well by reducing load at the source and also guarantee timeliness of notifications. However, malicious peers may stop propagating the updates or modify them, thus making the P2P mechanism useless or even harmful. We propose overlay independent randomized strategies to mitigate these ill-effects of malicious peers at a marginal overhead.

In the P2P approaches, generally a small subset of the end-users (Rootpeers) pull directly from the source and push any update downstream (to Downstream peers). Several such P2P approaches have been proposed [1], [2], [3]. Unlike other approaches, our approach puts the focus on the security issue, that is to protect the system against various malicious peers, without altering the behavior of currently deployed servers.

Part of the research presented in this paper has been supported by A*Star SERC Grant No: 0721340055.