A secure platform for peer-to-peer computing in the Internet

Abstract

Peer-to-peer computing (P2P) draws growing interest as a new distributed computing paradigm for its potential to harness "edge" computers (e.g., PCs) and make their under-utilized resources available to each other. P2P based e-commerce on the Internet is of particular interest because of P2P's cost effectiveness and redundancy-induced dependability. Beneath the promising benefits lie daunting challenges of supporting security, reliability, resilience, and scalability. In particular, scalable discovery and secure transaction are of paramount importance due to the sheer size and the laissez,faire nature of the Internet. E-Speak is an e-services infrastructure where services advertise, discover, and interoperate each other in a dynamic and secure way. The E-Speak security adopts a multi-layered approach and builds a range of protection mechanisms on top of the Public Key Infrastructure. The E-Speak advertising services have a dynamic pluggable architecture and implement a scalable wide-area discovery based on distributed queries. We argue that E-Speak may be used as the common secure, scalable infrastructure for different multiple P2P applications.