WHISPER: Middleware for Confidential Communication in Large-Scale Networks
| Abstract |
A wide range of distributed applications requires some form of
confidential communication between groups of users. In particular,
the messages exchanged between the users and the identity of group
members should not be visible to external observers. Classical
approaches to confidential group communication rely upon
centralized servers, which limit scalability and represent single
points of failure. In this paper, we present WHISPER, a fully
decentralized middleware that supports confidential communications
within groups of nodes in large-scale systems. It builds upon a
peer sampling service that takes into account network limitations
such as NAT and firewalls. WHISPER implements confidentiality in
two ways: it protects the content of messages exchanged between the
members of a group, and it keeps the group memberships secret to
external observers. Using multi-hops paths allows these guarantees
to hold even if attackers can observe the link between two nodes,
or be used as content relays for NAT bypassing. Evaluation in
real-world settings indicates that the price of confidentiality
remains reasonable in terms of network load and processing
costs. |
| Keywords |
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| Citation | V. Schiavoni, et al., "WHISPER: Middleware for Confidential Communication in Large-Scale Networks," in Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'11), Minneapolis, MN, 2011, . |
| Type | Conference paper (English) |
| Name of conference | Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'11) (Minneapolis, MN) |
| Date of conference | 20-6-2011 |
| URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS.2011.15 |
| Related project | MistNet: An Experimental Peer-to-peer Platform for the Cloud |