Malicious threats and novel security extensions in P2PSIP

P2PSIP is a protocol for managing multimedia sessions in a distributed architecture, where all participating nodes share and manage network resources like bandwidth and disk space. This paper presents threats associated with P2PSIP protocol and proposes protocol enhancement to mitigate possible attacks. These extensions have been designed for the leading draft of P2PSIP overlay management protocol, RELOAD. This paper proposes the use of Public key cryptography communication encryption, while symmetric cryptography is only used for peer authentication. The Public/Private Key (PPK) pair of each peer is refreshed based on a timer threshold, for the system to become even more robust. Through experimentation from a testbed, it is demonstrated that the overhead in terms of CPU load didn´t exceed 3% in both peak and average evaluation cases.