Getting the most from accountability in P2P

An important concern for P2P (peer-to-peer) developers is accountability. The few sources on P2P accountability define the term as a mechanism that makes the users accountable for their activity in the network. This general definition requires some refining to render it useful in the development of a P2P implementation. By ´accountability´ we denote three general functions for the system: one is the system ability to detect and log any activity inside the system for future reference; two is the system ability to convert this logged data into statistical information; and three is the response generated from this statistical information. Thus we have three foundational functions on which accountability is based. This paper suggests a low-overhead accountability scheme for content sharing