Peer-to-peer overlays for real-time communication: security issues and solutions

Peer to peer (P2P) networks offer higher robustness against failure, easier configuration and are generally more economical as compared to their client-server counterparts. This has made it reasonable for resource consuming and typically centralized applications like voice over IP (VoIP) and, in general, real-time communication to adapt and exploit the benefits of P2P. Such a migration needs to address a new set of P2P specific security problems. We go over some of the known issues found in common P2P networks. We then analyze the relevance of such issues and the applicability of existing solutions when using P2P architectures for real-time communication.