Growing secure P2P networks

Abstract: Secure peer-to-peer networks are getting increasingly popular on the Internet.A special type of these networks is the darknet that only uses connections totrusted friends. A major problem is with scaling: connections usually have to beset up manually, which leads to a slow network growth. The goal of this thesisis to investigate if it is possible to use existing social networks between peopleto set up the connections and grow such networks automatically. As a specificcase we consider Freenet, which offers peer-to-peer darknet functionality.Our work show that it is possible to grow such networks automatically, butthat it raises potential security problems. We illustrate this for several socialnetworks.