Re: [p2prg] Comments to draft-schulzrinne-p2prg-rtc-security-00

[Song Haibin <[e-mail]>]

Enrico,

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Enrico Marocco [mailto:[e-mail]] 
>Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:44 PM
>To: Song Haibin
>Cc: [e-mail]
>Subject: Re: [p2prg] Comments to 
>draft-schulzrinne-p2prg-rtc-security-00
>
>Thanks for an accurate review, Haibin, we'll integrate your 
>comments in the next version of the draft. A few notes inline.
>
>Song Haibin wrote:
>> 1. In Section 1, paragraph 1, "P2P networks are now also being used 
>> for applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) [SKYPE] [Singh] and 
>> television [JOOST] [COOLSTREAM]."
>>  
>> [Haibin] As far as I know, Joost has just changed its basic 
>P2P system 
>> architecture and turned to client/server architecture. It's 
>better to 
>> remove this reference.
>
>Yes, indeed, probably now PPLive is a better example of P2P 
>systems for realtime content delivery.
>

Good example.

>> 2. Section 2.1 Incentive of attacker
>>  
>> [Haibin]  I could give some additional common incentives of 
>attackers.
>> For example, some attacks are motivated by the business 
>competition or 
>> for selling security products. E.g., I heard some firewall product 
>> companies usually attack some company's network, and tell them their 
>> network is not safe, so that they could sell them firewalls. Attacks 
>> due to competition are also common cases. These kinds of attacks may 
>> happen to p2p overlays.
>
>While it is arguably a real issue in C/S scenarios, I'm not 
>sure who, in a P2P system, could be the target customer of 
>such security solutions.
>Maybe you are thinking of sort of a hybrid model, but the case 
>of some company selling a security product for an application 
>distributed by another company doesn't seem much realistic. 

I guess any peers located in a victim company could be the target of such
attack, if the p2p application is open on the internet. However, I don't
have a real example at my hand for such attack incentive in p2p
applications, but for c/s scenarios, google can give many good real
examples.


>OTOH I agree that competition could be a real incentive.
>
>> 5. In Section 5.1.2, Reactive identification, "In a file-sharing 
>> application for example, after downloading content from a 
>node, if the 
>> peer observes that data does not match its original query it can 
>> identify the corresponding node as malicious."
>>  
>> [Haibin] It is hard to determine which node is the malicious node in 
>> this context. But at least this content in this node can be marked 
>> with "malicious", or this node can be marked with "suspicious".
>
>Identification of malicious peers is actually a very complex 
>topic, subject itself of many possible attacks. The example in 
>section 5.1.2, surely over-simplistic, has the only intent to 
>pass to the reader a quick image of the reactive approach, but 
>it is of course far from a real solution.
>
>> 7. In section 7.1.2 When to upgrade
>>  
>> [Haibin] It lists some information to determine the peer load, e.g.
>> number of clients attached, bandwidth usage for DHT maintenance, 
>> memory usage for DHT routing table. I hope p2psip diagnostics
>> (draft-ietf-p2psip-diagnostics) mechanisms can be used to 
>collect the 
>> listed corresponding information from the overlay.
>
>At the time of writing the p2psip-diagnostics work was still 
>very early, but I agree that now it would be worth referenced here.

I agree.

BR
Haibin

>--
>Ciao,
>Enrico
>
>