WhanauSIP : a secure peer-to-peer communications platform

This thesis presents a novel mechanism for achieving secure and reliable peer-to-peer communications on the Internet. WhanauSIP merges a Sybil-proof distributed hash table with the session initiation protocol (SIP) to enable instant messaging, audio chat, and video conferencing that is resilient to censoring, eavesdropping, and forgery. Performance and security evaluations performed on the PlanetLab network demonstrate that the majority of resource lookups return within five seconds. These results indicate that WhanauSIP delivers practical performance with respect to call session initialization latency for voice-over-IP, without having to rely on any central servers. Furthermore, the tests demonstrated that lookup performance was minimally affected during a Sybil key-clustering attack, illustrating the network's resilience to malicious adversaries. This thesis delivers three software packages for public use: a general Whanau distributed hash table implementation, a WhanauSIP gateway, and a desktop IM/VoIP client.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Cheng, Raymond (Raymond Y.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Christopher Lesniewski-Laas and Frans Kaashoek.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62637

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/62637