Growing secure P2P networks

Abstract

Secure peer-to-peer networks are getting increasingly popular on the Internet. A special type of these networks is the darknet that only uses connections to trusted friends. A major problem is with scaling: connections usually have to be set up manually, which leads to a slow network growth. The goal of this thesis is to investigate if it is possible to use existing social networks between people to set up the connections and grow such networks automatically. As a specific case we consider Freenet, which offers peer-to-peer darknet functionality. Our work show that it is possible to grow such networks automatically, but that it raises potential security problems. We illustrate this for several social networks.