Enforcement of communal policies for P2P systems

We consider the question of how to establish and enforce communal policies for peer-to-peer (P2P) communities. Generally, members of each P2P community must conform to an application specific communal policy if the community is to operate smoothly and securely. An open question, however, is how can such communal policies be established reliably and in a scalable manner? While some communities can rely on voluntary compliance with their stated policies, voluntary compliance will not be sufficient for many future P2P applications. We illustrate the nature of policies that must be enforced to be reliable by means of an example of a community that operates like Gnutella, but which is established to exchange more sensitive and critical information than music files. Then, we propose to employ the intrinsically distributed control mechanism called Law-Governed Interaction (LGI) for the scalable enforcement of communal P2P policies. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, we show how our example policy can be formulated and enforced under LGI. Finally, we modify an existing open-source Gnutella client to work with LGI and show that the use of LGI incurs little overhead.