WhanauSIP : a secure peer-to-peer communications platform

Abstract

This thesis presents a novel mechanism for achieving secure and reliable peer-to-peer communications on the Internet. WhanauSIP merges a Sybil-proof distributed hash table with the session initiation protocol (SIP) to enable instant messaging, audio chat, and video conferencing that is resilient to censoring, eavesdropping, and forgery. Performance and security evaluations performed on the PlanetLab network demonstrate that the majority of resource lookups return within five seconds. These results indicate that WhanauSIP delivers practical performance with respect to call session initialization latency for voice-over-IP, without having to rely on any central servers. Furthermore, the tests demonstrated that lookup performance was minimally affected during a Sybil key-clustering attack, illustrating the network's resilience to malicious adversaries. This thesis delivers three software packages for public use: a general Whanau distributed hash table implementation, a WhanauSIP gateway, and a desktop IM/VoIP client.