Challenging the feasibility of authentication mechanisms for P2P live streaming

Peer-to-peer live streaming applications are becoming increasingly popular, and already reach millions of users worldwide. There are, however, many aspects in which these applications must evolve, among which video quality and security deserve particular attention. While the former is about to become a reality given recent advances in codecs and link bandwidth, the latter still presents great challenges. The decentralized nature of P2P live streaming systems makes them vulnerable to attacks, among which pollution is arguably the most harmful. Multimedia stream authentication allows the detection of polluted content and can help identifying malicious users, but its costs may be prohibitive. This paper presents an analytical evaluation of recent authentication mechanisms in light of their application in P2P live streaming. Its key contribution is to compare, unlike previous work, overheads and security of various signature amortization and light digital signature mechanisms for P2P live streaming of standard and high definition video. We demonstrate, contrary to previous work, that current authentication mechanisms do not scale in therms of quality, and are feasible in current hardware only with a favorable set of parameters. Our results justify the investigation of more efficient and adaptable approaches to the next generation of P2P streaming with secure, high definition video.