Peer-to-Peer Secure and Private Community Based Multimedia Communications

We have designed and implemented P2PWNC, a fully distributed, open to all, autonomous WLAN roaming scheme that can be used in a community to provide various multimedia communication services. Here we discuss various security related issues and the support provided by P2PWNC for several aspects of communication and roaming privacy. We also report on aspects of its performance, focusing on the performance penalty of security-related operations. The core P2PWNC scheme assumes that community members are selfish and do not trust each other and uses a secure incentive technique to encourage their contribution. It protects the real-world identities of community providers and clients by relying only on disposable opaque identifiers and does not rely on any authority to resolve disputes or control membership. It could easily complement cellular networks for low-mobility users in metropolitan areas where some wireless community networks provide wide coverage