An Efficient, Secure and User Privacy-Preserving Search Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

A peer-to-peer (P2P) network is a distributed system in which the autonomous peers can leave and join the network at their will and share their resources to perform some functions in a distributed manner. In an unstructured P2P network, there is no centralized administrative entity that controls the operations of the peers, and the resources (i.e., the files) that the peers share are not related to the their topological positions in the network. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the P2P networks have found increased interest in the research community since the search protocols for these networks can be gainfully utilized in the resource discovery process for the IoT applications. However, there are several challenges in designing an efficient search protocol for the unstructured P2P networks since these networks suffer from problems such as fake content distribution, free riding, whitewashing, poor search scalability, lack of a robust trust model and the absence a of user privacy protection mechanism. Moreover, the peers can join and leave the network frequently, which makes trust management and searching in these networks quite a challenging task. In this chapter, a secure and efficient searching protocol for unstructured P2P networks is proposed that utilizes topology adaptation by constructing an overlay of trusted peers and increases the search efficiency by intelligently exploiting the formation of semantic community structures among the trustworthy peers. It also guarantees that the privacy of the users and data in the network is protected. Extensive simulation results are presented and the performance of the protocol is also compared with those of some of the existing protocols to demonstrate its advantages.KeywordsP2P networktopology adaptationtrustreputationsemantic communitymalicious peeruser privacy