A Secure and Hierarchical Architecture for P2PSIP Session Initiation

Recently, both academia and industry have initiated research projects directed on integration of P2PSIP paradigm into communication systems. In this paradigm, P2P network stores most of the network information among participating peers without help of the central servers. The concept of self-configuration, self-establishment greatly improves the robustness of the network system compared with the traditional Client/Server based systems. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for constructing secure P2PSIP session initiation. The proposed approaches include: three-layer hierarchical overlay division, proxy based security, subjective logic based trust enhancement, NAT traversal, message routing, etc. After that, a prototype with 512 P2PSIP peers is implemented. We evaluate the system architecture in several aspects: implementation testing, Number of hops and the protection against malicious or compromised intermediate peers. We take Chord as the P2PSIP overlay as example. However, this system architecture is independent of Chord overlay and could be extended to the other DHT (Distributed Hash Table) technologies.