An entity of the analysed peer-to-peer network is a piece of software that has access to local resources. It advertises itself on the peer-to-peer network by presenting an identity. However, more than one identity could correspond to a single entity. In other words, the mapping of identities to entities could be many to one. Entities in peer-to-peer networks could use multiple identities for purposes of redundancy, resource sharing, reliability and integrity because, in peer-to-peer networks, the identity is used as an abstraction so a remote entity could be aware of other identities without necessarily knowing the correspondence of identities to local entities. By default, each different identity is usually assumed to correspond to a different local entity. However, actually, many identities may correspond to the same local entity.