JXTA resource access control by means of advertisement encryption

JXTA is an open-source initiative that provides a middleware for the creation and deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. Resources in a JXTA network are accessed through advertisements, special metadata documents published by its owner. By controlling access to advertisements, it is also possible to restrict access to resources. However, in an overlay multihop network, the final recipient of an advertisement is not the only one that obtains it, since intermediate peers may copy it. This paper presents a method for JXTA advertisement encryption in order to effectively control access to published resources. The scheme is fully distributed, based on a P2P pure model and does not disrupt core discovery services. The advertisement publisher controls which information should be globally disclosed and which will be restricted to only a particular subset of peers. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.