Penny: Secure, Decentralized Data Management
Safwan Mahmud Khan, Kevin W. Hamlen · 2014
Structured, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks scalably support efficient data-retrieval operations over large data sets without resorting to centralized servers that may be vulnerable to attack or failure. However, data confidentiality policies, such as data ownership privacy, are difficult to enforce reliably in these networks. This paper presents Penny, a structured P2P network that efficiently supports integrity and confidentiality labeling of data, and enforces a notion of ownership privacy that permits peers to publish data without revealing their ownership of the data. A decentralized reputation management system allows the network to respond and adapt to malicious peers. These features are applied to securely manage traditional files and large RDF data sets stored as N-triples in a P2P environment. Simulations demonstrate that Penny can efficiently handle realistic P2P network traffic and robust enough to prevent malicious collectives from subverting security labels.