Anonymously accessing JXTA community services through split message forwarding

Abstract

As peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have gained popularity and evolved to encompass different scenarios beyond simple file-sharing, such as ubiquitous and cognitive computing, awareness on the need for inclusion of security mechanisms into its design, has also raised. JXTA is an open P2P protocols specification that, for these reasons, has slowly incorporated security improvements such as message privacy and resource authentication, up to its latest version to this date, 2.7. However, under some contexts, even more advanced security requirements should be met. Anonymity, for which privacy is necessary but not a sufficient requirement, is a good example. Unfortunately, even though several approaches to message anonymization exist within the context of P2P networks, there is no perfect solution. In this work, we study the feasibility of anonymous access to JXTA community services using a split message-based approach. On that regard, we adapt a recently proposed anonymous protocol to JXTA's idiosyncrasies and assess its actual performance under typical JXTA network configurations.