rahmanm@cs.ucr.edu, ghyan@lanl.gov, michalis@cs.ucr.edu, harsha@cs.ucr.edu, eidenben@lanl.gov
Traditional
software and security patch update delivery mechanism relies on client/server
approach where clients pull an update from servers in a predefined interval.
However, this approach exhibits at least two problems such as higher window of
vulnerability (WOV) period exposed to clients and higher infrastructure cost
exposed to service providers due to the setup and maintenance of Content
Distribution Network (CDN) around the world. To address these problems, we
propose iDispatcher, a planet-scale, flexible and
secure information dissemination framework. iDispatcher uses push based approach to reduce the
WOV period and a peer-to-peer based architecture to achieve higher scalability.
We use an efficient key management scheme in which each node may only trust a
single key still be able to validate any dissemination centers who originate
the information. We build a prototype for evaluating iDispatcher
which is running on thousands of PlanetLab nodes
distributed around the world. Experimental results show that, iDispatcher exhibits small dissemination latency for
disseminating information in the entire network, high tunability
to optimize the tradeoff between bandwidth and latency and robustness against
different attacks such as flooding, Sybil. etc. iDispatcher is a practical solution for planet-scale
information dissemination which is ready to download and use. Possible uses of iDispatcher are in army command and control system, in a
shared network infrastructure where multiple dissemination centers co-exists
etc.