State-of-the-art, challenges and open issues in integrating security and privacy in P2P content distribution systems

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a swift development in network structures like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems, offering advantages such as significantly reducing the set-up running cost for the content providers and providing end users data access within very short time. However, today's P2P distribution systems are severely abused by illegal re-distributions, which not only result in heavy financial losses to the media industry, but also hinders the legal commercial use of P2P content distribution systems. Thus, in order to counteract the threat of illegal re-distribution of media files over P2P systems, the media industry has sought protection from technological solutions, which are designed to prevent copyright infringement. However, the incorporation of the content protection techniques within P2P systems poses serious privacy threats to end users. Although the privacy desired by a P2P user typically includes anonymity and unlinkability, complete anonymity cannot be provided to him/her since it creates a conflict between the basic starting points of preserving interests of the content provider and protecting the privacy rights of the user. Various researchers have examined the challenges characterizing these systems from diverse viewpoints, proposing strategic solutions. This paper presents a survey of integration components (i.e. content protection and privacy-preservation techniques) and recent proposals of P2P content distribution systems that incorporates both integrants. In addition, different challenges and open research issues are pointed out.