Providing a collaborative mechanism for peer group access control

Peer-to-peer applications enable users to create a communications framework from scratch without the need of a central service provider. This is achievable via the aggregation of resources each one of them provide, creating a completely distributed collaborative environment. Under some circumstances, groups of users operating in a global peer-to-peer network may need to create a closed communities, limiting access to the shared resources only to its members. This can be useful for security reasons or in order to provide scoping within the global overlay network. In order to achieve this scenario, security mechanisms must be implemented. In this paper, a method for peer group access control is presented managed only by the group members in an completely autonomous way without the need of any third parties.