Access control in peer-to-peer collaborative systems

As an emerging model of communication and computation, peer-to-peer networking represents a fully distributed, cooperative network design, and has recently gained significant acceptance. Peer groups share the properties of peer-to-peer overlay network, including full decentralization, symmetric abilities, and dynamism, which make security problems more complicated. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained and attribute-based access control framework for peer-to-peer systems. This design employs a novel policy model, which extends role-based trust management language RT to satisfy security requirements of peer groups. Intend for a pure decentralized model without centralized server, our framework presents distributed delegation authorization mechanism, which could avoid single point of failure. We also introduce our implementation experience.