Making p2p accountable without losing privacy

  • Authors:
  • Mira Belenkiy;Melissa Chase;C. Chris Erway;John Jannotti;Alptekin Küpçü;Anna Lysyanskaya;Eric Rachlin

  • Affiliations:
  • Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI;Brown University, Providence, RI

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Privacy in electronic society
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Peer-to-peer systems have been proposed for a wide variety of applications, including file-sharing, web caching, distributed computation, cooperative backup, and onion routing. An important motivation for such systems is self-scaling. That is, increased participation increases the capacity of the system. Unfortunately, this property is at risk from selfish participants. The decentralized nature of peer-to-peer systems makes accounting difficult. We show that e-cash can be a practical solution to the desire for accountability in peer-to-peer systems while maintaining their ability to self-scale. No less important, e-cash is a natural fit for peer-to-peer systems that attempt to provide (or preserve) privacy for their participants. We show that e-cash can be used to provide accountability without compromising the existing privacy goals of a peer-to-peer system. We show how e-cash can be practically applied to a file sharing application. Our approach includes a set of novel cryptographic protocols that mitigate the computational and communication costs of anonymous e-cash transactions, and system design choices that further reduce overhead and distribute load. We conclude that provably secure, anonymous, and scalable peer-to-peer systems are within reach.