IT-Security

Research Description

Overlay networks, most recently the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm, have added new services to networking. While overlay networks enhance communication efficiency and robustness of popular service applications, trust into all parties is assumed. Secure and fair operations have been neglected in many approaches. Our research aims to 1. strengthen cooperative behavior in P2P-based networks 2. enable secure and private, unobservable operations.

Integrity-based computing enforces data integrity in distributed systems, and therefore e.g. Trusted Platform Models can provide a fundament for secure cooperation. Peer-to-peer networks distribute their service at the price of additional attack possibilities. Malicious behavior can appear on various levels, from Denial-of-Service attacks utilizing community resources to unobservable misbehavior and undermining policies. The lack of peer-to-peer networks of monitoring, accounting, and enforcing security policies becomes a thread of future networks.

The emerging trend of network privacy strengthens data protection of individuals. Anonymity systems protect the relationship between identities and events, e.g. content requests, mails, other traces of network activity. Captured communication relationships can offend privacy of individuals. Research in this field must enhance the usability of solutions. Recent exposures showed that simple approaches of pseudonym data do fail and reveal sensible data of individuals.

Our research combines network privacy with mechanisms for secure cooperation. This is beneficial since unobservability is only reachable with a reasonable anonymity set, i.e. multiple cooperation parties.

Chair of Computer Networks and Computer Communications

IT-Security

Research Description

Launched Projects