Call for papers: "Security and Trust Issues in Peer-to-Peer Networks"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering.

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 such as BitTorrent, PPStream, eDonkey, and so on. While these applications often make various types of soft resources (e.g. audio, video, games, 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 often be present in such architectures because of the inherent dependence on peers who should cooperate with each other. Attacks against P2P systems can take manifold forms: distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, 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 high-profile hackers to breach data and find new methods of attack, unmonitored P2P file-sharing systems have been threatened today at unparalleled magnitude. Sensitive information could easily be exposed, harvested and distributed across multiple P2P networks, often with information from 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 others are based on mutual certificates. More recently, social networking-based certification systems have 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 a portion of the network. The idea is that a friend could certify and support another friend (i.e. here node). However, this kind of solution leaves many issues unanswered such as privacy issues, scalability of the network, handling of non-participating nodes, resource scarcity among 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.

This special issue's objective is to provide a platform for researchers to share their thoughts and findings on various security issues in P2P networks and systems. Our goal is to compile the latest advancements addressing the topic of security in P2P networks and systems, with particular focus on malicious peer detection-based approaches.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at theSecure Peer-to-Peer Intelligent Networks & Systems Workshop (SPINS 2014), in conjunction with ANT 2014, but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Detecting malicious peers in P2P networks
• Thwarting pollution attacks or poisoning attacks in P2P networks
• Handling resource unavailability due to the 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

Important Dates
Manuscript due date: 15 July, 2014