Centralized Security Labels in Decentralized P2P Networks

This paper describes the design of a peer-to-peer network that supports integrity and confidentiality labeling of shared data. A notion of data ownership privacy is also enforced, whereby peers can share data without revealing which data they own. Security labels are global but the implementation does not require a centralized label server. The network employs a reputation-based trust management system to assess and update data labels, and to store and retrieve labels safely in the presence of malicious peers. The security labeling scheme preserves the efficiency of network operations; lookup cost including label retrieval is O(log N), where N is the number of agents in the network.