The Peer-to-Peer Working Group, formed in October 2000, was put together to aid in the advancement of infrastructure standards for peer-to-peer computing. The P2P Working Group is a consortium of corporations dedicated to developing a host of industry standards for peer-to-peer computing technology. To help assure adoption of P2P technologies the group will focus on the development of industry-agreed, non-proprietary norms.
Specifications planned for definition by the Working Group include such issues as:
- Interoperability and performance of computing devices
- Security
- Management
- Privacy of data stored in web devices
- Common protocols for the way that information flows between, and is shared by, users of P2P devices
The overriding goal of the P2P Working Group is to develop infrastructure standards to enable peer-to-peer computing everywhere.
As computers become ubiquitous, ideas for implementation and use of peer-to-peer computing are developing rapidly and gaining prominence. But issues of inter-operability, security, performance, management, privacy and many more may stifle the growth of innovation. Many of these issues relate to infrastructure, where no value will be gained from proprietary solutions. Standards will promote ubiquity that is essential for peer-to-peer computing success. The working group will determine areas for standardization, rapidly develop specifications, and promote adoption of these specifications as standards throughout the computer industry.
In his opening presentation to the P2P Working Group, Bob Knighten, self-described as a Peer-to-Peer Evangelist from the Enterprise Architecture Labs at Intel Corporation, provided the audience with an overview of P2P. He looked at the three ages of the Internet, some current models for P2P, and the implications of its uses.
Knighten described the networks of clients in enterprise business as a massive untapped resource for corporate IT uses and developed a vision of what Virtual Private Webs should look like. Principles include:
- Access should be by content, not by address
- Members are people, not network interface cards (NICs)
- Sharing should take advantage of full network capabilities, but restricted to authorized users of the Virtual Private Web
- Directory views should be sharable among authorized members
Some of the practical uses that were enumerated were:
- Peer-to-peer storage
- Small group file sharing (collaboration)
- Distributed search engines
- Peer-to-peer virus protection
The call for what was needed for P2P to succeed in enterprise networks included:
- Ubiquity
- Interoperability standards
- Security standards for sharing within groups to guarantee trust
- Security standards to protect against attacks, both from file-based attacks (viruses, worms, etc.) and from network-based attacks (man in the middle, etc.)
- Controls for backup/restore
- Guarantees of identity of content
- Standards for storage and network management
- Resilience against failures (both hardware and software)
- Performance controls (scalability, protocol performance limitations, etc.)
- Community controls and rules for participating in a Virtual Private Web
At the end of the meeting, several demonstration systems were presented. Included were:
- P2P file sharing from Intel
- Secure Gnutella using Trusted Computing Platform
- Distributed business computing
- Distributed file server
- Peer-to-peer gaming
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