Adding Confidentiality to Pull-Based Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

Abstract

While pull-based peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming prevails in recent years, an important but less studied problem is security. To achieve security, confidentiality of the streaming data is essential and the corresponding key management scheme must scale well without degrading the system performance too much. In this paper, we thus propose P2P-SMP -a novel secure multicast protocol specifically designed for pull-based P2P live streaming -to achieve good reliability in key distribution and guarantee that the decryption key is received by legitimate peers before the corresponding encrypted streaming data even in dynamic P2P environments. Through extending the pull-based P2P live streaming protocol to distribute rekeying messages and further adopting a batch rekeying method, P2P-SMP dramatically reduces the communication and computing overhead in key distribution. The efficiency and reliability of P2P-SMP is evaluated through extensive simulations.