Malicious threats and novel security extensions in P2PSIP

Abstract

P2PSIP is a protocol for managing multimedia sessions in a distributed architecture, where all participating nodes share and manage network resources like bandwidth and disk space. This paper presents threats associated with P2PSIP protocol and proposes protocol enhancement to mitigate possible attacks. These extensions have been designed for the leading draft of P2PSIP overlay management protocol, RELOAD.. This paper proposes the use of Public key cryptography communication encryption, while symmetric cryptography is only used for peer authentication. The Public/Private Key (PPK) pair of each peer is refreshed based on a timer threshold, for the system to become even more robust. Through experimentation from a testbed, it is demonstrated that the overhead in terms of CPU load didn't exceed 3% in both peak and average evaluation cases.

Security Engineering of Patient-Centered Health Care Information Systems in Peer-to-Peer Environments: Systematic Review

“…The creation of Sybils is considered the most harmful behavior on a P2P system [ 54 ], as it offsets the network’s redundancy property [ 81 ]. Sybil attacks occur in a P2P network, when the reputation mechanisms are compromised [ 72 ], secure authentication mechanisms are not implemented (eg, no proof of identification is required for registration in the P2P session initiation protocol network [ 106 ]), or verification of a client’s IP address and its maximum number of connections per ID is not implemented (eg, Kad network [ 98 ]). Limiting the number of connections per IP address (eg, in eDonkey [ 84 ]) does not prevent Sybil attacks because attackers can bypass this by having many virtual IP addresses.…”

“…An eclipse attack is a large-scale man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack that is commonly executed at the P2P network level [ 54 , 92 ]; routing, sniffing, and traffic analysis attacks are variants [ 56 , 79 , 81 , 93 , 105 , 106 , 115 , 116 ]. An eclipse attack aims to separate the entire network into 2 or more partitions ( Figure 7 ) by placing malicious nodes in a strategic routing path of the P2P network [ 105 , 106 , 108 ] to surround benign nodes with malicious neighbors [ 77 ]. In most cases, the routing mechanisms are attacked [ 47 ].…”

“…Once the network is fully segmented with malicious nodes in between the partitions, the attacker can act as a gateway and disrupt the information flow between the network partitions, exclude groups of nodes from the network, or steal peer identities [ 54 , 77 ]. This affects the reliability, autonomy, and connectivity between peers and the CIA properties of P2P networks [ 72 , 106 , 114 ]. In addition to mounting an eclipse attack by manipulating the overlay network, an attacker that has collected a significant number of peer IDs and acts as a neighbor of benign nodes can easily mount eclipse attacks [ 54 , 77 , 81 , 107 ].…”

Real-Time Communications in Autonomic Networks: System Implementation and Performance Evaluation

“…Its distributed nature originates on the fact that it is divided into several parts each located inside an overlay peer and stores the physical addresses of all participating nodes in order to use them for resource availability lookup. Each node that receives a query for the address of a certain node searches its DHT fraction and if it contains the requested info, it returns it to the node that posted the query, otherwise it forwards the request to its logical neighbors [10].…”

Ανάπτυξη Τεχνικών Διαχείρισης Ασφαλούς Μετάδοσης Πολυμέσων Σε Δίκτυα Ομότιμων Κόμβων

“…Το βασικό πρωτόκολλο (σε επίπεδο Εφαρμογής) για επικοινωνία φωνής μεταξύ ομότιμων κόμβων είναι το Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) [30] το οποίο αναπτύσσεται στα πλαίσια ειδικής ομάδας εργασίας από την IETF [31]. Παρόλο που ενσωματώνει ορισμένους βασικούς μηχανισμούς ασφάλειας, παρουσιάζει συγκεκριμένες αδυναμίες [32] [33]. Το πρωτόκολλο που περιγράφηκε στην προηγούμενη παράγραφο αποτέλεσε για εμάς αφετηρία για την ανάπτυξη δύο νέων πρωτοκόλλων, εναλλακτικών ή συμπληρωματικών ως προς το υπάρχον πρωτόκολλο που καθορίζεται από το P2PSIP Working Group.…”