Secure routing in Peer to Peer networks

Abstract

A Peer to Peer (P2P) system is a collection of nodes that share effectively resources distributed throughout the network. It is known by its high scalability where it is able to accommodate an increasing number of users and resources, and its dynamic nature where nodes can join and leave the system easily and anytime. Security in P2P networks is a challenging task that is hard to achieve because a network is susceptible to malicious nodes that may drop messages, mislead the requesting nodes, not serve the queries, etc. P2P routing protocols are not immune against these misbehaviors. Detecting and dealing with malicious nodes will certainly lead to more reliable and secure system. In this thesis, we propose a trust aware P2P routing protocol that detects malicious nodes, classifies them according to their reputation level, then isolates them if necessary. When a node misbehaves, the node that initiated the request will detect the malicious behavior and report it to a trust management system that tracks the nodes’ reputation and reduces the credibility of nodes that are inaccurately evaluating other nodes; thus, their evaluations would not affect other nodes’ reputation. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed approach through simulations where it outperformed some well-known protocols found in the literature.