OblivP2P: An Oblivious Peer-to-Peer Content Sharing System

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are predominantly used to
distribute trust, increase availability and improve performance.
A number of content-sharing P2P systems, for
file-sharing applications (e.g., BitTorrent and Storj) and
more recent peer-assisted CDNs (e.g., Akamai Netsession),
are finding wide deployment. A major security
concern with content-sharing P2P systems is the risk of
long-term traffic analysis—a widely accepted challenge
with few known solutions.
In this paper, we propose a new approach to protecting
against persistent, global traffic analysis in P2P content sharing
systems. Our approach advocates for hiding
data access patterns, making P2P systems oblivious. We
propose OBLIVP2P— a construction for a scalable distributed
ORAM protocol, usable in a real P2P setting.
Our protocol achieves the following results. First, we
show that our construction retains the (linear) scalability
of the original P2P network w.r.t the number of peers.
Second, our experiments simulating about 16,384 peers
on 15 Deterlab nodes can process up to 7 requests of
512KB each per second, suggesting usability in moderately
latency-sensitive applications as-is. The bottlenecks
remaining are purely computational (not bandwidth).
Third, our experiments confirm that in our construction,
no centralized infrastructure is a bottleneck —
essentially, ensuring that the network and computational
overheads can be completely offloaded to the P2P network.
Finally, our construction is highly parallelizable,
which implies that remaining computational bottlenecks
can be drastically reduced if OBLIVP2P is deployed on
a network with many real machines.