Evaluation of a protocol to prevent malicious information flow in P2PPS systems

Abstract

In the peer-to-peer (P2P) type of topic-based publish/subscribe (P2PPS) model, each peer process (peer) can publish and subscribe event messages which are characterized by topics with no centralized coordinator. A peer pj publishes an event message ej after receiving an event message ei, i.e. ei causally precedes ej. Here, the event message ej may carry information of the event message ei. If a peer pk receives ej but is not allowed to subscribe the topics of ei, the peer pk illegally obtains the information of ei via ej. In addition, if a source peer pi publishes an event message e without related topics or with unrelated topics, a destination peer pj may misunderstand the meanings of the event message e, i.e. the event message e is maliciously received by the peer pj. In our previous studies, the SBS, TBS, FS-H protocols and the TBSM protocol are proposed to ban illegal and malicious event messages, respectively. In this paper, we evaluate the TBSM protocol in terms of the numbers of illegal and malicious types of event messages. In the evaluation, we show the ratio of the number of event messages banned decreases as the numbers of topics in a system increases.