Trustworthy infrastructure for Peer-to-Peer applications using hardware based security

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure has been used for designing many large-scale distributed systems. Structured P2P, in particular, has received a greater amount of research attention. Having trust in such the P2P environments can help mitigate many problems including security, because peers can choose to interact with the ones that are deemed trustworthy. However, there exists numerous hurdles that need to be overcome before a reliable trust system can be implemented for P2P. This thesis seeks to improve the existing reputation metrics and feedback mechanisms which are important components of the trust system. The new reputation metrics are more resilient to manipulations, and they take into account negative feedback. New protocols are also proposed as parts of the feedback mechanisms, and they allow an honest peer in a structured P2P system to securely detect if another peer has misbehaved. The new protocols make used of hardware-based security which is in the form of trusted devices: TPMs and the newly proposed trusted device called TTMs. The protocols are analyzed using formal methods and simulation. CSP is used to model and verify the properties of these protocols. The performance of these protocols is then evaluated using a new, distributed simulation platform called dPeerSim.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

d_ph

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

d_ph

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Birmingham

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Dinh, Tien Tuan Anh

• QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science