A mesh check scheme against P2P live streaming attacks

Abstract

With the wide spread of P2P streaming systems, there appear some hackers who try to pollute the system by inserting fake data chunks into the system. These "dirty" chunks will then be propagated to many normal peers, which will result in the failure of the whole system. Considering the playback quality and the burden of the client, most systems nowadays don't adopt any measures to protect the video content, such as encryption, CRC, or other methods. We think it's more important to eliminate the polluters actively than to prevent the peers from polluted passively. In the paper, we propose a new scheme which tries to leverage the P2P nature of the system. We piggyback some "check" bytes in the data chunks exchanged between different peers. On one hand, these "bytes" can verify the authenticity of the data chunks, which prevent the diffusion of the polluted chunks. On the other hand, they can also help to detect and identify the "polluters" of the system. By simulation, the effects of our schemes are evaluated and the results are very inspiring. We think this light-weight solution against the streaming attacks is promising and can be deployed in real world.