SPINS 2015 - 2nd International Workshop on Secure Peer-to-Peer Intelligent Networks & Systems

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networking is contributing to a vast amount of Internet traffic because many Internet users heavily use or depend on file sharing applications like BitTorrent, PPStream, eDonkey, and so on. While these applications often make various types of soft resources (e.g., audio, video, game, music, e-books) easily available via the P2P model, the operational mechanism of the network also makes the system vulnerable to various kinds of security threats. Malicious peers may be often present in such architecture because of the inherent dependence on peers who should cooperate with each other. Attacks against P2P systems could be manifold; Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, injection of useless data (commonly termed as “poisoning”) into the network or pollution attack, identity theft, collusion attack, Sybil attack, etc. Due to the constant efforts of the high-profile hackers for breaching data and finding new methods of attacks, unmonitored P2P file-sharing systems have been threatened today with unparalleled magnitude. Sensitive information could easily be exposed, harvested, and distributed across multiple P2P networks, often with information of government or critical military facilities.
To detect malicious peers, which are responsible for the vast majority of attacks, some schemes use reputation of nodes while some are based on mutual certificates. Especially, in the recent days, social-networking-based certification has been proposed in which a simple strategy of “Friend of Friend” is applied taking a chunk of nodes in the network. This chunk structure could be expanded to cover some portion of the network. The idea is that a friend could certify and support another friend (i.e., here node). However, such kind of solution leaves many issues unanswered like privacy issues, scalability of the network, handling of non-participating node, resource scarcity among the socially networked nodes, and so on. Besides these efforts, intelligent and adaptive methods are being developed using artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, game theory, and so on. The theme of peer-to-peer also covers various types of wireless ad hoc networks, which adds to the complexity of securing such networks. This workshop's objective is to provide a platform for the researchers and students to share their thoughts and findings on various security issues in P2P, wireless P2P, ad hoc networks and systems.
First edition of SPINS workshop was held in 2014 in conjunction with ANT'14 at Hasselt, Belgium.
Topics of Interest
In this workshop, our goal is to publish the latest advancements addressing the topic of security in P2P networks and systems, especially focused on malicious-peer detection based approaches and intelligent-adaptive approaches. Other issues may be blended with the security issues. The topics of interest are (though the list should not be considered exhaustive):
- Detecting malicious peers in P2P network
- Thwarting pollution attack or poisoning attack in P2P network
- Handling resource unavailability due to presence of malicious peers
- Trust management in P2P systems
- Social-networking based security management in P2P networks
- P2P vs Social networking security
- Intelligent and adaptive secure P2P systems
- Game theory based P2P system trust and security
- Defending against P2P data breaches
- Measuring evidence of cyber-criminal activity on P2P networks
- Wireless ad hoc peer to peer network security
- Peer-to-peer monitoring in wireless sensor networks