Stanford Researchers Trying to Protect P2P Networks
dirvish writes "New Scientist has a story about efforts from researchers at Stanford to protect peer to peer networks from attacks that could be permitted by the proposed Berman Bill. Neil Daswani and Hector Garcia-Molina of the Database Research Department at Stanford University have mathematically modeled the Gnutella network to discriminate between nodes and supernodes. They then tested the nodes to find which rules could be applied to best avoid a malicious node on the network thus conserving bandwidth."
well, since i know neil (he is my brother) i can vouch that his motives are good. he is very opposed to the berman anti-p2p hacking bill and he feels that any attempt to hack p2p networks will just be foiled by better p2p infrastructure.
also, i'm not positive who is funding his research (that info is all public, if you look you can find out for sure), but i think it isn't corporate in nature - i think it is the defense dept. the US defense element has a high interest in securing p2p networks from attack since future military operations might be based on p2p technologies.
smd4985