On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:36 PM, Yeongjin Jang yeongjinjanggrad@gmail.com wrote:
*Privacy concerns - Would a malicious person be able to force themselves to be someone's preferred peer, and spy on everything they read, etc.
*DOS concerns - Would a malicious peer or peers be able to prevent an honest user from connecting to the website? (I didn't look in detail at how you select peers and handle peer failure, so I'm not sure if this applies)
Nice points! For privacy, we want to implement k-anonymity scheme on the page access. However, it incurs more bandwidth consumption and potential performance overhead on the system.
Malicious peers can act as if they hold legitimate content (while actually not), or making null request to the peers. We are currently thinking about black-listing such malicious peers, and live-migration of mirror/peer servers if they fails, but more fundamental remedy is required.
Those are interesting ideas, although I'm skeptical you're going to be able to successfully keep malicious peers from tracking users' reading habits, in the same way that law enforcement tracks bittorrent downloads. But it would be great to hear proposals you come up with.
I haven't looked at the code, but are you also preventing malicious peers from modifying the content?