Building Efficient and Secured Peer-to-Peer Systems

Speaker:	Dr. Yunhao Liu
		Department of Computer Science
		Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Title:		"Building Efficient and Secured Peer-to-Peer Systems"

Date:		Monday, 4 October 2004

Time:		4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

P2P communication model established in overlay networks is an emerging
technology aiming to effectively utilize and manage increasingly large and
globally distributed information and computing resources in Internet,
complementing existing client-server services. In order to truly adopt the
P2P model for widely deploying large-scale Internet applications, and
timely merge this model as an indispensable component in main stream
distributed computing systems, we must address several major technical
challenges including the efficiency and scalability of overlay networks,
cost-effective and fast P2P information search, and privacy and security
protection of peers.

In the first part of the talk, I will present our solutions to address the
topology mismatch problem between P2P overlay networks and their
underlying physical networks, which is caused by the random and dynamic
nature of peer self-organizing overlay networks without any knowledge
about the physical topology. Most existing overlay topology optimization
methods attempt to identify physically closer nodes to connect as overlay
neighbors for a peer. These techniques could significantly shrink the
search scope in practice, which is not feasible in unstructured P2P
systems.  I will present several methods and their implementations to
address the limits of existing methods by effectively solving the overlay
topology mismatch problems in P2P systems while retain the search scope.
These methods are scalable and completely distributed in the sense that
they do not require global knowledge of a large region overlay network
when each node is optimizing the connections with its logical neighbors.
In the second part of the talk, I will describe current and future
research issues in P2P systems.


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Biography:

Yunhao Liu received his BS degree in Automation Department from Tsinghua
University, China, in 1995, and an MA degree in Beijing Foreign Studies
University, China, in 1997, and an MS and a Ph.D. degree in Computer
Science and Engineering at Michigan State University in 2003 and 2004,
respectively. He was a Regional Manager in China Telecom from 1997 to
1998, and a Deputy Director of E-Post office in State Postal Bureau of
China from 1998 to 2001. He is now an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology. His research interests include peer-to-peer computing,
pervasive computing, distributed systems, network security, embedded
systems, and high-speed networking. He is a member of the IEEE Computer
Society.