Ciphertext Retrieval in Super-Peer P2P Network

Super-peer p2p networks inherit the advantages of P2P networks, such as pooling together the shared data (documents in our system) across peers, self- organizing, and fault-tolerance. Most of the searches in p2p networks are plaintext-based and do not satisfy the pressing demands for high security in massive information sharing applications. In this paper, a super-peer p2p system is designed that supports ciphertext-based search for relevant documents. In the proposed system, a super-peer which contains all the encrypted index of documents in all the peers subordinate to it is added to the p2p system, and the indexing efficiency is improved by utilizing the indexing structure that binary trees are nested in a B+ tree. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the proposed scheme can achieve acceptable security and efficiency.