PSUM: Peer-to-peer multimedia content distribution using collusion-resistant fingerprinting

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 cost-effective distribution of content, also giving rise to piracy. An end user (buyer/peer) 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.To date, different P2P distribution systems have been proposed that provide copyright and privacy protection at a cost of high computational burden at the merchants and/or at the buyers end and thus, making these systems impractical.In this paper, we propose PSUM, a P2P content distribution system which allows efficient distribution of large-sized multimedia content while preserving the security and privacy of merchants and buyers. The security of PSUM is ensured by using an asymmetric fingerprinting protocol based on collusion-resistant codes. In addition, PSUM enables buyers to obtain digital contents anonymously, but this anonymity can be revoked as soon as he/she is found guilty of copyright violation. The paper presents a thorough performance analysis of PSUM, through different experiments and simulations, and also analyzes several security compromising attacks and countermeasures.Traditional client-server content distribution systems are dependent on a centralized server which is costly in terms of initial infrastructure investment and maintenance. Moreover, the lack of scalability and the high bandwidth requirements are some factors that degrade the client-server system performance. In contrast to client-server systems, P2P technology offers cost efficiency, scalability, less administrative requirements and exposure to a large number of users. These benefits are the attractive features for media companies towards the adoption of P2P systems. BitTorrent (BT) (BitTorrent, 2000) is one of the most popular P2P distribution systems used on the Internet for distributing large amount of data, and it accounts for a significant volume of Internet traffic. For example, Red Hat Inc. uses Preprint submitted to Elsevier the merchant into a small-sized base file and a large-sized supplementary file. The base file contains the most important information and, without it, the supplementary file is unusable. The merchant sends the base file to a buyer in a semi-centralized way and uses a network of peer buyers to distribute the supplementary file.2. The proposed asymmetric fingerprinting protocol based on a state-of-the-art collusion-resistant codes and an existing secure embedding scheme is performed between a merchant, a buyer and a set of P2P proxies in the presence of a third party (monitor). The proposed fingerprinting protocol (Section 3.4.2) provides significantly improved efficiency over that of similar schemes that have been presented in the past, by using the idea of pre-computation-based secure embedding and permutation. In pre-computation-based secure embe...

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

“…Although the selective public-key encryption of the multimedia content, which affects only a few coefficients, results in lesser data expansion, it imposes a computational burden on a merchant and an increased complexity for file reconstruction at the buyer's end. More recently, Qureshi et al (2016) took advantage of some of these ideas, but replaced homomorphic encryption by fragmentation, symmetric encryption, permutation and distribution of the fragments through a collection of proxy peers. Furthermore, the embedding step is pre-computed using a string of all '1's and one of all '0's and, hence, no actual embedding is required for each transaction.…”

“…• Win et al (2011);Domingo-Ferrer and Megías (2013); Qureshi et al (2015Qureshi et al ( , 2016; Megías and Domingo-Ferrer (2014); Megías (2015) guarantee revocable privacy. In these systems, the real identity of the users is only revealed by the trusted third party, i.e.…”

“…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.…”

“…It is apparent, from Table 1, that most of the presented P2P distribution systems focus on either providing copyright protection to content owners or privacy to end users. Only a few P2P content distribution systems (Domingo-Ferrer and Megías and Domingo-Ferrer, 2014;Megías, 2015;Qureshi et al, 2015Qureshi et al, , 2016 exist that focus on both copyright protection (with collusion resistance) and user privacy and anonymity. For this reason, these are the systems selected for a detailed comparison with the proposed scheme in Section 4.2.…”

“…This is the overall time required for transferring the file for each buyer. Qureshi et al (2016) This section carries out a comparative analysis of the proposed system with PSUM presented in (Qureshi et al, 2016). The comparison focuses on the performance of the systems in terms of computational and communication costs.…”