Security Policy Management for Peer Group Meetings

Peer-to-peer (P2P) video conference systems receive more attention recently due to their distinct advantages over traditional server-based systems. Security is of primary concern for these systems when running over the public network. To secure the privacy of meetings an appropriate security architecture is required. The security policy management is one of the central components in such architecture to control the security components and to attune the security level needed in a conference. Despite its vital importance for secure P2P conference systems, little attention has been paid to the security policy management so far. How to effectively agree upon a common security policy in a decentralized setting remains an open issue. In this paper, we propose a practical solution to manage the security policy of P2P conference systems.