Secure File Sharing in JXTA Using Digital Signatures

This paper presents the development of a secure file sharing mechanism in JXTA, a universal platform independent Peer to Peer (P2P) environment. Digital Signatures are chosen as the tool for ensuring authenticity and integrity of shared files in a hybrid P2P environment. The application developed is based on JXSE, the Java implementation of JXTA and reuses CMS as an early realization of Content Management System by the community, but which does not support security out of the box. The contribution of this paper is a new security model for sharing files in CMS. In this paper, the design, implementation and evaluation of such model are presented, then conclusions are drawn and the windows for practical implementation are opened.