Abstract: Peer-to-peer architectures are designed for the sharing network, storage and computing resources solving a scalability problem. At the same time they lack capabilities for creating private groups that are necessary for a limited access data exchanging – a common task for e-learning systems. In this paper proposed a new peer-to-peer system that is able to create private groups that is built on top of WebRTC stack and thus is capable to run in modern browsers without additional software installation. It solves problems of authentication, data validity, management control and secure peer discovery in distributed network systems by using private and public keys as well as data exchanging rules that provide same level of data dissemination security as in client-server applications. This system provides ability of creating closed groups of students, where teacher is able to transmit data securely and combine low operational cost of video streaming and file sharing advantages of Tailcast topology. Moreover teacher’s capabilities are not limited to only data dissemination process, this application gives additional functions like banning and kicking users as well as a secure access promoting to other participants of the network. While proposed techniques are designed and implemented for the Tailcast topology, it’s shown that it is possible to apply these recommendations in most peer-to-peer applications including other video-streaming topologies, distributed hash tables and file sharing.

Keywords: peer-to-peer, security, distributed systems, e-learning

ACM Classification Keywords: C.2.4 Distributed Systems

Link:

PRIVATE GROUPS IN PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKS

Oleh Hordiichuk, Oleksiy Bychkov

http://www.foibg.com/ijima/vol04/ijima04-04-p04.pdf