John Buford

Parallelizing Peer-to-Peer Overlays with Multi-Destination Routing

A method is provided for parallelizing overlay operations in an overlay network. The method includes: identifying an overlay operation having a parallel messaging scheme; determining a destination address for each parallel message in the messaging scheme; encoding each destination address into a data packet; and transmitting the data packet over the overlay network using a multi-destination, multicast routing protocol.

Composition trust bindings in pervasive computing service composition

In pervasive computing, devices or peers may implement or compose services using services from other devices or peers, and may use components from various sources. A composition trust binding is a prescriptive set of rules which defines the combination of allowable components for a particular service or application. Composition trust bindings can be used to protect both the service invocation path as well as the content handling path. The subsidiary relationships addressed by a composition trust binding are typically transparent today, but represent potential security exposure in pervasive computing systems because the subsidiary services or components may have security vulnerabilities. We define the composition trust binding and illustrate its use in the context of rights management and distributed search in personal content publishing. We compare this approach to existing authentication and authorization methods in service composition

Meta service discovery

Meta service discovery is used to find and select a service discovery mechanism by context. As multiple service discovery mechanisms (SDM) proliferate across various administrative domains, mobile devices will require a way to locate and select the appropriate mechanism according to the context of the mobile device, such as network domain, location, protocol, and application. We define meta service discovery and explain the motivation for it. We describe our results in building a meta service discovery capability on three existing DHTs and integrated into a new broadcast-oriented SDM. Finally, we analyze the sizing and distribution of DHT entries, including hash distribution of SDM entries according to a geographic population-density scheme

Peer-to-peer streaming for networked consumer electronics [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

Applications such as multimedia communications and entertainment make media streaming a key feature for peer-to-peer (P2P) technology embedded in networked consumer electronics. In this article, we discuss some key issues that are relevant to enabling peer-to-peer streaming in networked consumer electronics and address possible technical solutions to the issues of interoperability, NAT/firewall traversal, and codec inflexibility. We also address how to improve overall system performance by introducing a notion of node coordinates into the discovery of services on a P2P network and confirm the effectiveness of our approach using simulation. We conclude with a discussion of our prototype CE-oriented P2P streaming system.

Sleeper: A Power-Conserving Service Discovery Protocol

The design of service discovery protocols which limit power consumption of devices has received little consideration but is an important problem because of the growing use of power-limited mobile networked devices. We describe Sleeper, a new discovery protocol which uses proxied advertisement and discovery to dynamically offload service discovery workload from power-limited devices. The advertisement structure supports several modes of service discovery including conventional service advertisements, meta discovery, taxonomic-based discovery, location-based discovery and federated discovery. In addition, Sleeper supports both push and pull modes of advertisement, but unlike other protocols uses service popularity to select push or pull modality. We describe an implementation of the new protocol and provide an analytical model for comparing response time to other push-based service discovery methods

Using FIPA Agents with Service-Oriented Peer-to-Peer Middleware

Peer-to-peer technologies have emerged as an alternative to traditional client-server networking which can enable highly scalable end-to-end applications. The coupling of agent platforms with peer-to-peer overlay networks enables the integration of many agent platforms and enriches the semantic functionality of peer-to-peer systems. Here we present two important results based on combining recent work in FIPA agents and peer-to-peer service oriented middleware. First we describe the coupling between peer-to-peer overlay and the FIPA agent platform, including how the overlay can be used by APs to discover each other. Second we describe the relationship between agent services and peer services, including service discovery and mapping mechanisms. Finally we discuss the benefits of this integration.

Tork: A Variable-Hop Overlay for Heterogeneous Networks

We present a new variable-hop peer-to-peer overlay that combines active stabilization and opportunistic maintenance to provide overlay nodes with a large range of hop-count versus peer bandwidth capabilities. Because of the variable-hop design, Tork is suitable for use in large-scale heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks where peers have a range of bandwidth capacities. For high-bandwidth peers Tork has O(I)-hop performance, and for low-bandwidth, most likely mobile peers, Tork has multi-hop performance. We further show that mapping overlay messaging to multi-destination routing in the underlay reduces Tork message overhead by up to 35%

Multi-Destination Routing and the Design of Peer-to-Peer Overlays

We propose the integration of peer-to-peer network overlays with underlay networking in which multidestination multicast routing is available. Network overlay operations are parallelized by using multidestination multicast messages in the underlying network in place of same-source unicast messages. This mechanism is generally applicable to structured overlays including one-hop, multi-hop, and variable-hop, and unstructured overlays. The main result is significant message reduction, which varies according to the overlay algorithm.

Social certificates and trust negotiation

When participating in online communities and ad hoc interactions, peer trust is based on societal relationships where identity alone is typically insufficient. We propose a new method for automatic establishment of peer trust that is suitable for peer-topeer and ad-hoc networking applications which overcomes the shortcomings of existing approaches. This method includes a new type of property-based certificate which we call a Social Certificate, and a new approach for trust negotiation in which privacy is assured by isolating the negotiation using a Secure Trust Negotiation Agent. Each Secure agent acts as the negotiator for its peer, upholding the peers trust negotiation policies while keeping shared information secret. We describe these new methods and the security technology underpinning the Secure Trust Negotiation Agent.

Analysis of using java card for DRM master key security

Recently Wei and Montemayor [1] have demonstrated a Java Card™ smart card application for authenticating playback for DRM-protected media. In this scheme the Java Card stores the encrypted master key and communicates during media playback with a signed content handler to securely provide the segment keys to the content handler for decryption and rendering of the media. In this paper we summarize the Java Card-based design and analyze its vulnerabilities.