A Two-Key Agreement Based Supervising Mechanism for Cluster-Based Peer-to-Peer Applications

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies are developing rapidly and have gained popularity. The application of P2P to areas such as file sharing, collaborative business environment, and distributed computing requires secure communication among the nodes. Cluster-based P2P structure provides an efficient way to do file sharing and distributed computing. A key agreement protocol is a set of communication rules whereby two users establish a shared common key. The shared key is used by users in future secure communications. Supervising services for governing communications between two nodes is an important topic, especially in the area of government affairs. The proposed paper provides a framework for supporting a supervising mechanism in cluster-based P2P networks based on the concept of two-key agreement protocol. This mechanism uses the idea of hash-based two-key agreement protocol to help the nodes in higher level supervise the nodes in lower level for cluster-based P2P communication environment. In the proposed paper, a global cluster head supervises the whole network, cluster heads in each cluster supervise their own clusters´ communications. Security analyses show that the proposed mechanism is secure enough for P2P. Any two nodes within the same cluster generate their common session key by themselves. In the same cluster, no nodes gain this session key except the cluster head. Moreover, there are only two kinds of operations, hash operation and XOR operation, in the proposed mechanism. Hence, the proposed mechanism provides an efficient way to supervise the P2P network.