Providing witness anonymity in peer-to-peer systems

In this paper, we introduce the concept of witness anonymity for peer-to-peer systems. Witness anonymity combines the seemingly conflicting requirements of anonymity (for honest peers who report on the misbehavior of other peers) and accountability (for malicious peers that attempt to misuse the anonymity feature to slander honest peers). We propose the Secure Deep Throat (SDT) protocol to provide anonymity for witnesses of malicious or selfish behavior to enable such peers to report on this behavior without fear of retaliation. On the other hand, in SDT the misuse of anonymity is restrained in such a way that any malicious peer that attempts to send multiple claims against the same innocent peer for the same reason (i.e., the same misbehavior type) can be identified. We also describe how SDT can be used in two modes. The active mode can be used in scenarios with realtime requirements, e.g., detecting and preventing the propagation of peer-to-peer worms, whereas the passive mode is su...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Bo Zhu, Sanjeev Setia, Sushil Jajodia
• Keywords: Anonymity, CCS 2006, Peer-to-peer Systems, Security Privacy, Witness Anonymity