PAG: Private and Accountable Gossip

A large variety of content sharing applications rely, at least partially, on gossip-based dissemination protocols. However, these protocols are subject to various types of faults, among which selfish behaviours performed by nodes that benefit from the system without contributing their fair share to it. Accountability mechanisms (e.g., PeerReview, AVMs, FullReview), which require that nodes log their interactions with others and periodically inspect each others’ logs are effective solutions to deter faults. However, these solutions require that nodes disclose the content of their logs, which may leak sensitive information about them. Building on a monitoring infrastructure and on homomorphic cryptographic procedures, we propose in this paper PAG, the first accountable and partially privacy-preserving gossip protocol. We assess PAG theoretically using the ProVerif cryptographic protocol verifier and evaluate it experimentally using both a real deployment on a cluster of 48 machines and simulations. The performance evaluation of PAG, performed using a video live streaming application, shows that it is compatible with the visualisation of live video content on commodity Internet connections. Furthermore, PAG’s bandwidth consumption inherits the desirable scalability properties of gossip when the number of users in the system grows.