SECURE HETEROGENEOUS CLUSTER-BASED NEWSCAST PROTOCOL

Abstract

The area of peer-to-peer overlay networks is gaining attention of researchers world-wide, due to its popularity and area of applications. Heterogeneous Cluster based Newscast Protocol (HCNP) is one of the many protocols available to design a peer-to-peer overlay network. The characteristic of HCNP is efficient topology generation by introducing completely nonhierarchical clusters with inherent capability of handling heterogeneity. Heterogeneity reflects differences in physical capabilities related to local resources of network nodes (e.g. RAM, storage space etc.). HCNP is one of gossip based protocols that regularly exchanges and updates its cache view with other neighbor nodes to get freshest nodes list. HCNP is vulnerable to attacks just like other unstructured Gossip based overlay network protocols (e.g. Newscast), and can easily be exploited by a malicious node leading to wrong clusters configuration. To avoid this situation, a malicious node should be either restricted outside the network or its interference should be blocked some way. Security measures (e.g. authorization, authentication, confidentiality and integrity) are mandatory to avoid different types of attacks by malicious nodes on the node cache. This research introduces a new version of HCNP that provides security to the overlay architecture. It secures HCNP architecture by restricting malicious nodes outside the overlay. The Secure-HCNP uses Key Assignment on the basis of Heterogeneous Capabilities (KAHC-RSA), a new version of standard RSA designed specifically for HCNP that has dynamic key configuration capability. Secure-HCNP provides heterogeneous security levels dependent on the nodes capabilities. Secure-HCNP is implemented and tested on a peer-to-peer simulation test bed PEERSIM (a simulation tool for peer-to-peer networks). The experiments, when compared with other researches in the same direction, have shown that Secure-HCNP can not only be used as a replacement of HCNP for secure exchange of protocol related information but also for other gossip based protocols security, without compromising much on efficiency. Similarly, KAHCRSA can be used as an efficient encryption scheme for any smaller piece of information (e.g. Identification number, capability level etc.). This research is a first step towards implementation of an encryption scheme for security of protocol specific information (a layer below application level) in gossip based protocols. The experiments also demonstrate that regardless of computational complexity of RSA, KAHC-RSA can be used in a densely populated environment with more efficiency as compared to the original RSA and CRT RSA.