Towards Secure Data Exchange in Peer-to-Peer Data Management Systems

Abstract

In a peer-to-peer data management system (P2PDMS) peers exchange data in a pair-wise fashion on-the-fly in response to user queries without any centralized control. When peers exchange highly confidential data over an insecure communication channel, the data might be intercepted and read by intruders. As there is no centralized control for data exchange among peers in a P2PDMS, we cannot assume any central third party security infrastructure (e.g. PKI) to protect confidential data. This paper proposes a security protocol for data exchange in P2PDMSs based on pairing-based cryptography and data exchange policy. The protocol allows the peers to compute their secret session keys dynamically during data exchange session by computing a pairing on an elliptic curve, that is based on the policies between them.We show using a formal verification tool that the proposed protocol is safe, and is robust against different attacks including man-in-the middle, the masquerade, and the reply. Furthermore, the computational and communication overhead of the protocol are analyzed