File-sharing Applications Research Articles

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Using Honeypot Network for Cloud Security

Abstract: The rapid increase in the number of users, there is a rise in issues related to hardware failure, web hosting, space and memory allocation of data, which is directly or indirectly leading to the loss of data. With the objective of providing services that are reliable, fast and low in cost, we turn to cloud-computing practices. With a tremendous development in this technology, there is ever increasing chance of its security being compromised by malicious users. A way to divert malicious traffic away from systems is by using Honeypot. It is a colossal strategy that has shown signs of improvement in security of systems. Keeping in mind the various legal issues one may face while deploying Honeypot on third-party cloud vendor servers, the concept of Honeypot is implemented in a file-sharing application which is deployed on cloud server. This paper discusses the detection attacks in a cloud-based environment as well as the use of Honeypot for its security, thereby proposing a new technique to do the same.

ConTrib: Maintaining fairness in decentralized big tech alternatives by accounting work

“Big Tech” companies provide digital services used by billions of people. Recent developments, however, have shown that these companies often abuse their unprecedented market dominance for selfish interests. Meanwhile, decentralized applications without central authority are gaining traction. Decentralized applications critically depend on its users working together. Ensuring that users do not consume too many resources without reciprocating is a crucial requirement for the sustainability of such applications. We present ConTrib, a universal mechanism to maintain fairness in decentralized applications by accounting the work performed by peers. In ConTrib, participants maintain a personal ledger with tamper-evident records. A record describes some work performed by a peer and links to other records. Fraud in ConTrib occurs when a peer illegitimately modifies one of the records in its personal ledger. This is detected through the continuous exchange of random records between peers and by verifying the consistency of incoming records against known ones. Our simple fraud detection algorithm is highly scalable, tolerates significant packet loss, and exhibits relatively low fraud detection times. We experimentally show that fraud is detected within seconds and with low bandwidth requirements. To demonstrate the applicability of our work, we deploy ConTrib in the Tribler file-sharing application and successfully address free-riding behaviour. This two-year trial has resulted in over 160 million records, created by more than 94’000 users.

Exploring WebRTC Potential for DICOM File Sharing.

This paper explores the potential use of WebRTC set of protocols for DICOM file exchange. We have developed a simple proof-of-concept peer-to-peer DICOM file-sharing web application based on a set of WebRTC protocols. Application performance is compared with contemporary DICOM applications and transfer protocols which showed that WebRTC has its place in the DICOM file-sharing domain.

Measurement of Quality of Service (QoS) in File Sharing Applications with the Android-Based Client Server Method

In this research, an application is made that can make it easier to transfer files or data by utilizing a wifi connection on a network and then transferring files via a web browser using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server technology which will be installed on an Android-based smartphone. After that, it is necessary to measure network performance to determine the quality of the network in accessing the application. The measured performance is Quality of Service (QoS), which is a parameter that shows the quality of data packets on the network. Based on the results of measurements carried out by connecting the server to the AH building network and the client accessing from the AI ??building network at the State Polytechnic of Malang, when compared to the ITU-T standard, the application delay is in the very good category, jitter is in the bad category, the throughput value depends on the size. data sent. For packet loss, it is in the very good category. Meanwhile, based on measurements made using the Apache benchmark software, out of the 1000 requests that were tested, none of them failed or failed.

Context-aware RAON middleware for opportunistic network

Application development and deployment on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is a major challenge in the widespread use of MANET. The increasing D2D communication in 5G networks has renewed interest in an effective middleware design for MANET where application developers face various challenges such as unstable connectivity, high error rate, mobility induced disruption and disconnection, and limited battery power. We find that unstructured overlay network provides a good abstraction to facilitate application development and deployment on MANET. In this paper, we present the design of a middleware that builds a Resource-Aware Overlay Network (RAON), which is an unstructured overlay network of nodes engaged in the application that employs a query–reply mechanism for resource discovery. RAON is enhanced with features such as proactive neighbor replacement, congestion-aware data download and cooperative caching. Simulation results show that these features are effective in reducing query delay, improving data availability, and balancing node power consumption with protocol performance. We also present the middleware software design that offers the API based on node and path abstractions to applications. The middleware implements a generic context framework for acquiring device and user context. We discuss the implementation of application-level multicast and credit-based file-sharing applications using the middleware API. The middleware is implemented in Java J2ME on Android, which is tested in an ad hoc network of Nexus 7 devices running OLSR.

A pairing-based cryptographic approach for data security in the cloud

This paper presents AES4SeC, a security scheme fully constructed over cryptographic pairings. The main building blocks of AES4SeC are attribute-based encryption (ABE) and short signatures (SSign), with generalized constructions for the Type 3 pairing. AES4SeC was developed as an end-to-end storage service for hybrid cloud models and integrated to a file-sharing application for scenarios where data owners upload content to the cloud and selectively decide who is able to access that content. An experimental evaluation of AES4SeC was conducted by testing different security levels, recommended key sizes, and cryptographic engine constructions. This led to a wide experimental evaluation in terms of the running times of the primitive operations (encrypt, decrypt, sign, verify) and the space complexity of the ciphertexts, private and public keys, and the signatures. The implementation results revealed the feasibility and flexibility of AES4SeC in real scenarios, whereas a fine-tuning evaluation revealed that the best results in terms of performance and memory requirements are obtained using Type 3 pairings over type F elliptic curves. This is a relevant result because most of the ABE and SSign schemes in the literature are provided for the Type 1 pairing (symmetric) over type A curves, which exhibited poorer results.

A Comparative Demonstration and Analysis of File Sharing Applications on Android Mobile Devices

A Comparative Demonstration and Analysis of File Sharing Applications on Android Mobile Devices

A scheme of resource allocation and stability for peer–to–peer file–sharing networks

Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks offer a cost-effective and easily deployable framework for sharing content. However, P2P file-sharing applications face a fundamental problem of unfairness. Pricing is regarded as an effective way to provide incentives to peers to cooperate. In this paper we propose a pricing scheme to achieve reasonable resource allocation in P2P file-sharing networks, and give an interpretation for the utility maximization problem and its sub-problems from an economic point of view. We also deduce the exact expression of optimal resource allocation for each peer, and confirm it with both simulation and optimization software. In order to realize the optimum in a decentralized architecture, we present a novel price-based algorithm and discuss its stability based on Lyapunov stability theory. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can attain an optimum within reasonable convergence times.

A Model Approach to the Estimation of Peer-to-Peer Traffic Matrices

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications have witnessed an increasing popularity in recent years, which brings new challenges to network management and traffic engineering (TE). As basic input information, P2P traffic matrices are of significant importance for TE. Because of the excessively high cost of direct measurement, many studies aim to model and estimate general traffic matrices, but few focus on P2P traffic matrices. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate P2P traffic matrices in operational networks. Important factors are considered, including the number of peers, the localization ratio of P2P traffic, and the network distance. Here, the distance can be measured with AS hop counts or geographic distance. To validate our model, we evaluate its performance using traffic traces collected from both the real P2P video-on-demand (VoD) and file-sharing applications. Evaluation results show that the proposed model outperforms the other two typical models for the estimation of the general traffic matrices in several metrics, including spatial and temporal estimation errors, stability in the cases of oscillating and dynamic flows, and estimation bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research on P2P traffic matrices estimation. P2P traffic matrices, derived from the model, can be applied to P2P traffic optimization and other TE fields.

Improving lookup reliability in Kad

Kad is one of the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networks deployed on today’s Internet. It provides support for file-sharing applications such as eMule and aMule and serves millions of users. Its reliability impacts not only the availability of file-sharing services, but also the capability of supporting other Internet services. However, in today’s Kad network, its lookup operation’s success ratio is lower than 91 % and not suitable for critical applications. In this paper, we investigate why Kad lookup fails and propose several new solutions. We build a measurement system called Anthill to analyze Kad’s communication process quantitatively, and figure out that the causes of Kad’s lookup failures can be classified into four categories: packet loss, selective Denial of Service nodes, search sequence miss, and publish/search space miss. The first two are due to the environment changes, the third is caused by the detachment of routing operations and content operations in Kad, and the last one shows the limitations of the Kademlia DHT algorithm under Kad’s current configuration. Based on the analysis, we propose corresponding approaches for Kad, including packet-retransmission, neighborhood lookup, and β-adjusting. We have systematically measured the effectiveness and efficiency of these approaches, and then give several recommendations for adoption in different situations. The improved version of Kad can achieve a success ratio of 99.8 % for lookup operations, with only a moderate communication overhead, while its average lookup latency is reduced significantly to only about 1 second. Our work shows that, with proper configurations and improvements, Kad can work much better and is capable of supporting more Internet services.

On the Impact of Incentives in eMule {Analysis and Measurements of a Popular File-Sharing Application}

Motivated by the popularity of content distribution and file sharing applications that nowadays dominate Internet traffic, we focus on the incentive mechanism of a very popular, yet not very well studied, peer-to-peer application, eMule. In our work, we recognize that the incentive scheme of eMule is more sophisticated than current alternatives (e.g., BitTorrent) as it uses a general, priority-based, time-dependent queuing discipline to differentiate service among cooperative users and free-riders. In this paper, we describe a general model of such an incentive mechanism and analyze its properties in terms of application performance. We validate our model using both numerical simulations (when analytical techniques become prohibitive) and with a measurement campaign of the live eMule system. Our results, in addition to validating our model, indicate that the incentive scheme of eMule suffers from starvation. Therefore, we present an alternative scheme that mitigates this problem, and validate it through numerical simulations and a second measurement campaign.

Customer Resources and Economic Sustainability of Online Channels

In this chapter, I used the strategy dynamics methodology, which is a combination of the resource-based theory and system dynamics, to explain the sustained ability of two online channels to deliver economic value to its users. I posed that since spam and file-sharing applications are acutely dependent on customer resources they both can be understood in terms of the limits-to-growth generic feedback structure. That insight led to a conclusion that these digital channels were able to survive and thrive due to their underlying feedback structure. The computer experiments, however, made it clear that despite their apparent invulnerability commercial e-mail and file-sharing can succumb to strong external shocks.

Survey of Various Search Mechanisms in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) [1] are widely used for file sharing purposes. This type of usage provides decentralized solutions over centralized complex architecture. Peer-to-Peer networks are gaining attention from both the scientific perspective as well as the large Internet community. Popular applications utilizing this new technology offer many attractive features to a growing number of users. P2P is an architecture which is all-together a different class of applications that use the concept of distributed resources to perform an important crucial function in a decentralized manner. The popularity and bandwidth consumption attributed to current Peer-to-Peer filesharing applications makes the operation of these distributed systems very important for the Internet community. Efficiently discovering the queried resource is the initial and most important step in establishing an efficient peer-to-peer communication. Here, we will be describing and analyzing the performances of some existing search mechanisms deployed for the peer discovery and the content look up.

FairTorrent: A Deficit-Based Distributed Algorithm to Ensure Fairness in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer file-sharing applications suffer from a fundamental problem of unfairness. Free-riders cause slower download times for others by contributing little or no upload bandwidth while consuming much download bandwidth. Previous attempts to address this fair bandwidth allocation problem suffer from slow peer discovery, inaccurate predictions of neighboring peers' bandwidth allocations, underutilization of bandwidth, and complex parameter tuning. We present FairTorrent, a new deficit-based distributed algorithm that accurately rewards peers in accordance with their contribution. A FairTorrent peer simply uploads the next data block to a peer to whom it owes the most data as measured by a deficit counter. FairTorrent is resilient to exploitation by free-riders and strategic peers, is simple to implement, requires no bandwidth overallocation, no prediction of peers' rates, no centralized control, and no parameter tuning. We implemented FairTorrent in a BitTorrent client without modifications to the BitTorrent protocol and evaluated its performance against other widely used BitTorrent clients. Our results show that FairTorrent provides up to two orders of magnitude better fairness, up to five times better download times for contributing peers, and 60%-100% better performance on average in live BitTorrent swarms.

Secure Digital Contents Distributing System on P2P Networks

In recent years, the file-sharing applications of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, such as Napster, Bit-Torrent (BT), Gnutella, have become very popular, with BT offering particularly high scalability and efficiency service to transmit files. But BT does not enforce the access control process, so a lot of unauthorized files are freely shared. In this paper, we proposed a digital rights management (DRM) system for BT environment to solve the serious piracy issue by using lightweight encryption methods in order to be adopted by small mobile devices in wireless environment.

ModelNet-TE: An emulation tool for the study of P2P and traffic engineering interaction dynamics

In the Internet, user-level performance of P2P applications may be determined by the interaction of two independent dynamics: on the one hand, by the end-to-end control policies applied at the P2P application layer (L7); on the other hand, by Traffic Engineering (TE) decisions taken at the network level (L3). Currently available tools do not allow to study L7/L3 interactions in realistic settings due to a number of limitations. Building over ModelNet, we develop a framework for the real-time emulation of TE capabilities, named ModelNet-TE, that we make available to the scientific community as open source software. ModelNet-TE allows (i) to deploy real unmodified Internet P2P applications, and to test their interaction with (ii) many TE algorithms, as its design allows to easily integrate other TE algorithms than those we already provide, (iii) in a furthermore controlled network environment. Due to these features, ModelNet-TE is a complementary tool with respect to hybrid simulation/protoyping toolkits (that constrain application development to a specific language and framework, and cannot be used with existing or proprietary applications) and to other open testbeds such as PlanetLab or Grid5000 (lacking of control or TE-capabilities respectively). ModelNet-TE can thus be useful to L7-researchers, as it allows to seamlessly and transparently test any existing P2P application without requiring any software modification. At the same time, ModelNet-TE can be useful to L3-researchers as well, since they can test their TE algorithms on the traffic generated by real applications. As a use case, in this work we carry on an experimental campaign of L7/L3 routing layers interaction through ModelNet-TE. As TE we consider the classic minimum congestion load-balancing, that we compare against standard IP routing. As example P2P applications, we take BitTorrent, one among the most popular file-sharing applications nowadays, and WineStreamer, an open source live-streaming application. We emulate BitTorrent and WineStreamer swarms over both realistic topologies (e.g., Abilene) and simplistic topologies that are commonly in use today (e.g., where the bottleneck is located at the network edge) under a variety of scenarios. Results of our experimental campaign show that user-level performance may be significantly affected by both the TE mechanism in use at L3 (e.g., due to interactions with TCP congestion control or P2P chunk trading logic), as well as scenario parameters that are difficult to control in the wild Internet, which thus testifies the interest for tools such as ModelNet-TE.

The importance of considering unauthentic transactions in trust management systems

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, trust management is a key tool to minimize the impact of malicious nodes. EigenTrust is claimed to be one of the most powerful distributed reputation management systems focused on P2P file-sharing applications. It is the theoretical base of other systems, and it has also been directly modified in an attempt to improve its performance. However, none of them give appropriate importance to all the information about transactions. This paper proposes an enhancement of EigenTrust, which considers unsatisfactory transactions in greater depth. Pos&Neg EigenTrust is able to obtain a blacklist of the identities of the malicious nodes. Therefore, it is able to significantly reduce the number of unsatisfactory transactions in the network.

Performance Evaluation of Proactive Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Application for Releasing Network Congestion of Backbone Network in an Intranet

Peer-to-peer (P2P) application could be viewed as fast pull-based file-sharing system. P2P methods can deliver large files by dividing them into small chunks. However, P2P implementations employ greedy delivering strategies that can easily congest backbone network, but all kinds of data must be delivered on the backbone network. Through P2P methods, most of the connections available to a file host are occupied through pull-based methods by file retrievers. This limits the ability of the host to deliver any other data. P2P applications flood the backbone network with packets, thus leading to congestion. As a result, such P2P applications are banned on enterprise networks, where connections are expensive resources. Nevertheless P2P computing still retains significant advantages in file transmission. A delivering file can get to its destination through P2P application, but in the same time, the communication/delivery of other networking applications will be blocked. The data delivered/communicated through applications other than P2P one might have very important means for the management/business. Therefore, to utilize efficient P2P application on enterprise network is ideal, but the flooding of the backbone network by P2P chunks must be controlled. Thus, a P2P file-sharing application that actively manages network traffic would be ideal for the enterprise networks. Here, a proactive P2P (EP2P) file-sharing application proposed by Liang et al. (2009) that the performance has been proved by mathematic analysis and computer simulation could be considered as the solution that proactively manages network traffic. The best way to evaluate the system performance is through the real implementation on the network. In this study, the unit transmission time and block rate are evaluated as parameters determining the performance and cost of different file-sharing applications through 500 times of experiments. The experimental results show that through controllable P2P application, the manager could manage the bandwidth consumption of backbone network. The EP2P could be considered by the companies concerning on the balance between delivery efficiency and networking-traffic load.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR PEER-TO-PEER COMMUNITIES

Abstract Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems are essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behaviors. The system collects locally-generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield the global reputation scores. Surprisingly, most previous work ignored the distribution of peer feedbacks. We use a trust overlay network (TON) to model the trust relationships among peers. After examining the eBay transaction trace of over 10,000 users, we discovered a power-law distribution in user feedbacks. Our mathematical analysis justifies that power-law distribution is applicable to any dynamicall yg rowing P2P systems, either structured or unstructured. We develop a robust and scalable P2P reputation system, PowerTrust, to leverage the power-law feedback characteristics. The PowerTrust system dynamically selects small number of power nodes that are most reputable using a distributed ranking mechanism. By using a look ahead random walk strategy and leveraging the power nodes, the PowerTrust significantly improves in global reputation accuracy and aggregation speed. PowerTrust is adaptable to dynamics in peer joining and leaving and robust to disturbance by malicious peers. Through P2P network simulation experiments, we find significant performance gains in using PowerTrust. This power-law guided reputation system design proves to achieve high query success rate in P2P file-sharing applications. The system also reduces the total job make span and failure rate in large-scale, parameter-sweeping P2P Grid applications. A peer to peer network exploits diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application. A pure peer to peer network doesn't have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. Peers act as equals, merging the roles of clients and server. There is no central server managing the network. There is no central router.

A free-rider aware reputation system for peer-to-peer file-sharing networks

Recently, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have widely been used to file-sharing applications due to their decentralized architecture and reliability. The popularization of P2P networks also provides peers with ulterior motive an ideal environment to spread malicious files. In the past, many reputation systems have been proposed to differentiate malicious peers and to stop malicious file spreading. However, these reputation systems do not concern with reducing free riders in P2P networks. Free riders are peers who just download files but do not share anything to other peers. They significantly destroy the philosophy of P2P file-sharing networks. In this paper, we propose a free-rider aware reputation system for P2P file-sharing networks. Indeed, our reputation system can degrade the willing of free riders. Compared to most existing reputation systems, our reputation system provides an easy way to reduce malicious file spreading and free riding.