Designing Security Architecture for a P2P Video Conference System

More and more modern group oriented collaborative applications use the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm to be independent of expensive infrastructures as they are, for instance, provided for audio and video conferences by H.323 systems. Decentralized collaborative P2P solutions require appropriate mechanisms to protect group privacy and data integrity. A centralized client/ server based video conference system can be well shielded in a standard manner, whilst there are no off-the-shelf approaches to securing a P2P video conference up to now. This paper addresses this urgent issue by presenting an effective and flexible security architecture and showing how it can be embedded into a P2P video conferencing system using the BRA VIS system [4] as an example.