Incorporating data integrity in gossip based overlay networks

As we increasingly rely on information infrastructures to support critical operations in different areas, data integrity in overlay networks has significant importance with potentially rigorous consequences. Different attacks on data integrity aims to degrade availability of the secure and unmodified data to the network system. Gossip, or epidemic, protocols have emerged significantly to implement highly scalable and resilient reliable network system. Data integrity techniques in gossip protocol can have a significant role in order to secure data from an adversary. This paper describes an approach to represent and detect threats regarding data integrity in gossip based overlay networks. Establishing secure links between pairs of directly connected gossip nodes is an important issue for building overlay networks. This paper systematically identifies important security requirements of symmetric key setup. A preconfigured master key scheme is proposed that can satisfy the data integrity requirements if the master key has not been compromised. In this approach preconfigured master key is used in order to generate symmetric keys which are used to incorporate integrity checks.