A multimedia-content authentication and recovery protocol in peer-to-peer networks

In peer-to-peer (P2P) and overlay network environments, digital multimedia is allowed to be freely copied, shared and disseminated in a decentralized manner. Such environments do not guarantee authentication or preservation of the data. Furthermore, if the multimedia data, particularly video, images, or audio, has been polluted during this sharing process, there are no decentralized mechanisms that guarantee recovery of the original data. We propose a new distributed and highly scalable authentication and recovery protocol to achieve timely authentication and recovery in polluted P2P networks. We characterize and model the recovery problem in the polluted P2P environment. To optimize the decentralized authentication and recovery operations, we introduce three collaboration models: one-peer full-file, one-peer multiple-chunk and cluster-based. We evaluate the performance of the three models and highlight the effect of file-service capacity assuming zipfpsilas file popularity distribution. We also compare our models with a recovery model that is equivalent of LOCKSS preservation system for text documents. Performance evaluation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.