Security Issues and Solutions in Peer-to-Peer Systems for Realtime Communications
Henning G. Schulzrinne, Enrico Marocco, Emil Ivov · 2010
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have become popular for certain applications and deployments for a variety of reasons, including fault tolerance, economics, and legal issues. It has therefore become reasonable for resource consuming and typically centralized applications like Voice over IP (VoIP) and, in general, realtime communication to adapt and exploit the benefits of P2P. Such a migration needs to address a new set of P2P-specific security problems. This document describes some of the known issues found in common P2P networks, analyzing the relevance of such issues and the applicability of existing solutions when using P2P architectures for realtime communication. This document is a product of the P2P Research Group. Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research and development activities. These results might not be suitable for deployment. This RFC represents the consensus of the Peer-to-Peer Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Documents approved for publication by the IRSG are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at