SPEAR

Overview of SPEAR

Peer-to-peer protocols increasingly appear in commercial data distribution and communication applications. Although several proprietary solutions are highly successful, an open standardized architecture for secure P2P services is only emerging. Many open issues need to be addressed, including peer lookup, scalability and resilience, NAT traversal, interoperating IPv4 and IPv6 peers, and performance on lightweight devices.

The project on Secure Peer-to-peer Services Overlay Architecture (SPEAR) attempts to develop a generic mechanism to support such distributed services as P2P Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP). In contrast to other approaches, security is taken as the corner stone of design, integrating support for Host Identity Protocol (HIP) Based Overlay Networking Environment (HIP-BONE) into the architecture. The architecture can support various P2P services, not limited to P2PSIP, such as P2P HTTP. We envision that P2P HTTP can be used to create a community version of many useful scenarios (such as photo sharing and web caches) as plenty of current applications are based on HTTP. 

The work is conducted at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) with the help of grants received from the NLnet foundation. The work is carried out jointly with industrial partners actively involved in developing protocol specifications in the IETF. In particular, the design of a protocol stack combing overlay peer protocol with HIP and IPsec, binding peer identities to host identities, hierarchical P2P systems, and prevention of unwanted traffic are in scope of the project. An existing proof-of-concept demonstration of P2PSIP proxy will be further developed and tested with real users, and its usability will be evaluated.