Identity attack and anonymity protection for P2P-VoD systems

Abstract

As P2P multimedia streaming service is becoming more popular, it is important for P2P-VoD content providers to protect their servers identity. In this paper, we first show that it is possible to launch an “identity attack”: exposing and identifying servers of peer-to-peer video-on-demand (P2P-VoD) systems. The conventional wisdom of the P2P-VoD providers is that identity attack is very difficult because peers cannot distinguish between regular peers and servers in the P2P streaming process. We are the first to show that it is otherwise, and present an efficient and systematic methodology to perform P2P-VoD servers detection. Furthermore, we present an analytical framework to quantify the probability that an endhost is indeed a P2P-VoD server. In the second part of this paper, we present a novel architecture that can hide the identity and provide anonymity protection for servers in P2P-VoD systems. To quantify the protective capability of this architecture, we use the “fundamental matrix theory” to show the high complexity of discovering all protective nodes so as to disrupt the P2P-VoD service. We not only validate the model via extensive simulation, but also implement this protective architecture on PlanetLab and carry out measurements to reveal its robustness against identity attack.