@inproceedings{belenkiy2007making,
author = {Belenkiy, Mira and Chase, Melissa and Erway, C. Chris and Jannotti, John and Kupcu, Alptekin and Lysyanskaya, Anna and Rachlin, Erin},
title = {Making P2P Accountable Without Losing Privacy},
booktitle = {Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society},
year = {2007},
month = {January},
abstract = {Peer-to-peer systems have been proposed for a wide variety of applications, including file-sharing, web caching, distributed computation, cooperative backup, and onion routing. An important motivation for such systems is self-scaling. That is, increased participation increases the capacity of the system. Unfortunately, this property is at risk from selfish participants. The decentralized nature of peer-to-peer systems makes accounting difficult. We show that e-cash can be a practical solution to the desire for accountability in peer-to-peer systems while maintaining their ability to self-scale. No less important, e-cash is a natural fit for peer-to-peer systems that attempt to provide (or preserve) privacy for their participants. We show that e-cash can be used to provide accountability without compromising the existing privacy goals of a peer-to-peer system.

We show how e-cash can be practically applied to a file sharing application. Our approach includes a set of novel cryptographic protocols that mitigate the computational and communication costs of anonymous e-cash transactions, and system design choices that further reduce overhead and distribute load. We conclude that provably secure, anonymous, and scalable peer-to-peer systems are within reach.},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/making-p2p-accountable-without-losing-privacy/},
edition = {Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society},
}