Project Maelstrom: Forensic Analysis of the BitTorrent-Powered Browser

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. released their distributed peer-to-peer powered browser, Project Maelstrom, into public beta. The browser facilitates a new alternative website distribution paradigm to the traditional HTTP-based, client-server model. This decentralised web is powered by each of the visitors accessing each Maelstrom hosted website. Each user shares their copy of the website;s source code and multimedia content with new visitors. As a result, a Maelstrom hosted website cannot be taken offline by law enforcement or any other parties. Due to this open distribution model, a number of interesting censorship, security and privacy considerations are raised. This paper explores the application, its protocol, sharing Maelstrom content and its new visitor powered ``web-hosting\u27\u27 paradigm

A collaborative, semantic and context-aware search engine

Search engines help people to find information in the largest public knowledge system of the world: the Web. Unfortunately its size makes very complex to discover the right information. The users are faced lots of useless results forcing them to select one by one the most suitable. The new generation of search engines evolve from keyword-based indexing and classification to more sophisticated techniques considering the meaning, the context and the usage of information. We argue about the three key aspects: collaboration, geo-referencing and semantics. Collaboration distributes storage, processing and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. In this paper, we expose the studies, the concepts and the solutions of a research project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture.213-21

DART: the distributed agent based retrieval toolkit

The technology of search engines is evolving from indexing and classification of web resources based on keywords to more sophisticated techniques which take into account the meaning and the context of textual information and usage. Replying to query, commercial search engines face the user requests with a large amount of results, mostly useless or only partially related to the request; the subsequent refinement, operated downloading and examining as much pages as possible and simply ignoring whatever stays behind the first few pages, is left up to the user. Furthermore, architectures based on centralized indexes, allow commercial search engines to control the advertisement of online information, in contrast to P2P architectures that focus the attention on user requirements involving the end user in search engine maintenance and operation. To address such wishes, new search engines should focus on three key aspects: semantics, geo-referencing, collaboration/distribution. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Collaboration distributes storage, processing, and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. In this paper, we describe the studies, the concepts and the solutions developed in the DART project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture

Improving User Interaction on Ontology-based Peer Data Management Systems

The issue of user interaction for query formulation and execution has been investigated for distributed and dynamic environments, such as Peer Data Management System (PDMS). Many of these PDMS are semantic based and composed by data peers which export schemas that are represented by ontologies. In the literature we can find some proposed PDMS interfaces, but none of them addresses, in a general way, the needs of a PDMS for user interaction. In this work we propose a visual user query interface for ontology-based PDMS. It provides a simple and straightforward interaction with this type of system. It aims not only providing a natural visual query interface but also supporting a precise and direct manipulation of the data schemas for query generation

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Integrating XQuery and P2P in MonetDB/XQuery*

MonetDB/XQuery* is a fully functional publicly available XML DBMS that has been extended with distributed and P2P data management functionality. Our (minimal) XQuery language extension XRPC adds the concept of RPC to XQuery, and exploits the set-at-a-time database processing model to optimize the networking cost through a technique called Bulk RPC. We describe our approach to include the services offered by diverse P2P network structures (such as DHTs), in a way that avoids any further intrusion in the XQuery language and semantics, and show how this, similarly to Bulk RPC, will lead to further query optimization opportunities where the XDBMS interacts with the underlying P2P network. We also discuss some P2P data management applications were MonetDB/XQuery* is being used (an in-home small scenario and a wide-area collaborative application). As this research is work-in-progress, we outline some research questions on our path towards defining and realizing P2P XDBMS technology

Adding Query Privacy to Robust DHTs

Interest in anonymous communication over distributed hash tables (DHTs) has increased in recent years. However, almost all known solutions solely aim at achieving sender or requestor anonymity in DHT queries. In many application scenarios, it is crucial that the queried key remains secret from intermediate peers that (help to) route the queries towards their destinations. In this paper, we satisfy this requirement by presenting an approach for providing privacy for the keys in DHT queries. We use the concept of oblivious transfer (OT) in communication over DHTs to preserve query privacy without compromising spam resistance. Although our OT-based approach can work over any DHT, we concentrate on communication over robust DHTs that can tolerate Byzantine faults and resist spam. We choose the best-known robust DHT construction, and employ an efficient OT protocol well-suited for achieving our goal of obtaining query privacy over robust DHTs. Finally, we compare the performance of our privacy-preserving protocols with their more privacy-invasive counterparts. We observe that there is no increase in the message complexity and only a small overhead in the computational complexity.Comment: To appear at ACM ASIACCS 201