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Peer-to-Peer Computing >> Meeting the P2P Challenge
1/31/2005
Finally, there’s the Health Science Center at Texas Tech University, where Security Systems Analyst Lane Timmons says he has successfully fought peer-to-peer problems via a completely different approach. The Timmons plan d'esn’t block P2P file sharing internally; instead, the Health Science Center blocks it from the Internet. To facilitate this, Timmons spent $140,000 to combine a UnityOne-2000 Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from TippingPoint (www.tippingpoint.com), with a traffic redirection tool, QRadar from Q1Labs (www.q1labs.com). At the network perimeter, Timmons has programmed the TippingPoint box to drop all packets involved with file sharing. In the event that these packets somehow make it through the gateway, the QRadar technology kicks in, redirecting users into a “quarantine” VLAN that instructs them to curtail all peer-to-peer activity with the outside world.
“We’d like to think that when it comes to P2P, we take a kinder, gentler approach,” he says. “Inside our secure campus network, students can do what they want. As long as none of the P2P files make it to the Internet (or vice versa), we feel we’re doing our job well.”
Looking Ahead
Similarly laissez faire approaches to file sharing inside a campus network may be on the horizon elsewhere, too. At Penn State, where Halm works his magic, a similarly enterprising effort is underway to combine the talents of a variety of open source programmers into an entirely new kind of P2P architecture. The effort, part peer-to-peer and part identity management, is LionShare, and it offers an authenticated environment in which users are known both to their institution and to each other. Under this system, users will be able to share personal and community collections with efficiency and without the threat of unauthorized access or undesired content. What’s more, because LionShare simply d'es not permit the transmission of content that cannot be linked to its original copyright holder, officials at the RIAA and other copyright industry organizations are quite literally jumping for joy, hailing the technology as a great way to eradicate many of the previous concerns about P2P all together.
Version 1.0 of LionShare is expected to be released in late September 2005. When it g'es live, Lionshare users will log on with digital identities they receive from their home institutions. At any time, users will be able to see who is sharing what—a form of openness designed to deter illicit activity from the get-go. Users will upload information to the LionShare PeerServer, and will be able to utilize Access Control Lists to designate which other individual users are allowed access to the data. Theoretically, anyone will be able to search for information, but only those users who previously have been authorized to download data off a user’s peer server will be allowed to go ahead and take it. The system also will let users designate file-sharing capabilities for finite periods, enabling institutions to control copyrighted material in much the same manner they would offline.
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