Governed Content Distribution on DHT Based Networks

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are widely used for sharing digital items without structured metadata and in absence of any kind of digital rights management applied to the distributed contents. In this paper we propose the implementation of a prototype application that makes use of a structured P2P system enabling the indexing of complex metadata, used to express digital rights. In this way the media contents are exchanged and played according to the expressed grants. The creation and the consumption of the shared contents can be performed through any MPEG-21 REL compliant software and the application allows indexing and search for both governed and ungoverned contents. The information about the license can be included in the queries and the P2P network can be used to share governed contents (both free and with fee) in a legitimate way. In particular the proposed approach represents a suitable solution for indexing and querying rights complex structures on DHT based networks.

Exploiting P2P scalability for grant authorization in digital rights management solutions

“…The P2P network model and protocol adopted have been a DHT solution since it may be managed as a distributed database and store of replica, and these replicas are located in closer nodes in terms of the hash code, that typically are not geographically closer. Please note that in [3], the P2P network has been used to index rights and metadata allowing users to search for content, but not as a distributed database for verification and grant authorization.…”

“…The solution presented in this paper complements the solution proposed in [7] which was limited to the exploitation of P2P for content sharing and distribution. In [1][2][3], the P2P network based on DHT has been used to index rights and metadata allowing users to search content integrated with licenses (the so called governed resources) by looking for specific license issuers, right grants or principals (right recipient user) in the P2P. This last case of iDRM [3], the proposed P2P solution presents unsolved complexities in the DRM management, since the verification and authentication activities are still performed by referring to a central server, without exploiting the P2P network.…”

“…In [1][2][3], the P2P network based on DHT has been used to index rights and metadata allowing users to search content integrated with licenses (the so called governed resources) by looking for specific license issuers, right grants or principals (right recipient user) in the P2P. This last case of iDRM [3], the proposed P2P solution presents unsolved complexities in the DRM management, since the verification and authentication activities are still performed by referring to a central server, without exploiting the P2P network. Moreover, the iDRM solution presented a limited flexibility since licenses are supposed to be simple and independent one another, in any case managed in the license server.…”

“…This allows stressing the points where a DRM solution can be adapted to exploit the P2P capabilities, so as to reduce the complexity and costs of the DRM service, considering scenarios related to the user verification and grant authorization from licenses. & Section 4 presents the details regarding the insertion of the DHT P2P into the DRM solutions for managing the grant authorizations, and not for managing content as in [7], and [1,3]. The proposed solution is general enough to be adopted in other DRM solutions since the information stored into the P2P refers to the grant authorization and to the certification of device which are suitable for almost all DRM solutions.…”