Framework for preserving security and privacy in peer-to-peer content distribution systems

Abstract

The use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks for multimedia distribution has spread out globally in recent years. The mass popularity is primarily driven by efficient distribution of content, also giving rise to piracy. An end user (buyer) of a P2P content distribution system does not want to reveal his/her identity during a transaction with a content owner (merchant), whereas the merchant does not want the buyer to further distribute the content illegally. Therefore, there is a strong need for a content distribution mechanism over P2P networks that do not pose security and privacy threats to the copyright holders and end users, respectively. The existent systems for copyright and privacy protection employ cryptographic mechanisms at a cost of high computational burden which makes these systems impractical to distribute large sized files, such as music albums or movies. In this paper, we propose and analyse a P2P content distribution system which allows efficient distribution of large-sized content while preserving the security and privacy of merchants and buyers, respectively. Our proposed framework is able to resolve the problems of piracy tracing, buyer frameproofness, collusion resistance, dispute resolution and buyer's anonymity. We have carried out simulations to evaluate the performance of our framework in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, throughput and content delivery costs. The experimental results confirm that the proposed framework provides an efficient solution to copyright infringement issues over P2P networks, reducing the multimedia file sizes as much as five times on average, while protecting the end users' privacy and anonymity.

Collusion-resistant and privacy-preserving P2P multimedia distribution based on recombined fingerprinting

“…A similar idea is presented in (Domingo-Ferrer, 2011), where the embedded information contains an expiration date used to enforce digital oblivion. Qureshi et al (2014Qureshi et al ( , 2015 proposed a P2P content distribution framework for preserving privacy and security of the user and the merchant based on homomorphic encryption. In this framework, a few discrete wavelet transform low-frequency (approximation) coefficients are selected according to a secret key for embedding an encrypted fingerprint, exploiting the properties of a homomorphic cryptosystem.…”

“…The following observations can be made with respect to security against collusion and communication attacks: • The communication channel used for transferring the data between two users of the systems of Qureshi et al (2015Qureshi et al ( , 2016; Megías and Domingo-Ferrer (2014); Megías (2015); Isdal et al (2010); Tsujio and Okabe (2015) are protected against malicious attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service and replay attacks.…”

On the Difficult Tradeoff Between Security and Privacy: Challenges for the Management of Digital Identities

“…Although DRM is usually assumed to be just a mechanism to protect intellectual property, it also provides privacy protection as a result of avoiding information leakage in assets with Personal Identifiable Information (PII) [2]. DRM systems can (and, in some cases, should) be extended considering P2P privacy-respectful platforms [29] and Private Information Retrieval protocols (PIR) [3].…”

Secure Multimedia Content Distribution for M2M Communication

“…Kang [8] researched a secure stream media distribution scheme to improve the bandwidth efficiency. D. Megias presented a P2P multimedia content distribution framework [9,10]. In the letter [11], Hu and Li propose an efficient asymmetric multimedia fingerprinting scheme.…”