Abstract
Peer-to-Peer technologies offer promising and potential features for scalable communication networks. The peer-to-peers decentralized nature along with its extreme flexibility make them a robust solution to an expected network failure since it can avoid the centralized choke points and collectively distribute the network workload along with it vast routing capabilities. Unfortunately, many of the peer-to-peer networks are still immature and suffer from security weaknesses and threats. Among these are: no standardized trust mechanisms, no standard P2P-based API for security operations, including encryption, authentication, and even logging. This paper seeks to present and explore the security weaknesses and threats in the peer-to-peer networks with surveying solutions that are being considered in the real life peer-to-peer network designs and the in networking literature. Finally, we highlight what we identify as a fundamental peer-to-peer network problem: trust of peers and secure traffic routing.