SPoIM: A close look at pollution attacks in P2P live streaming

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live streaming traffic has been growing at a phenomenal rate over the past few years. When the original streaming content is mixed with bogus data, the corresponding P2P streaming network is being subjected to a "pollution attack." As the content is shared by peers, the bogus data can be spread widely in minutes. In this paper, we study the impact of a pollution attack in popular streaming models, under various network settings and configurations. The study was conducted in SPoIM, our emulation of real-world P2P streaming systems under pollution attacks, through which we observed that the feasibility of the attack is sensitive to the speed at which an attacker can modify content. Our experimental results showed that different streaming approaches are more vulnerable in one network configuration than the others, and that the impact and effectiveness of the attack is not dependent on the network size, but does highly depend on the network stability and the bandwidth availability of the polluters and the source. Based the experimental results, we suggested possible improvements in streaming models to defend themselves against the pollution attack. Finally, we examined possible defense mechanisms and demonstrated the effectiveness of a reputation-based defense mechanism against a typical pollution attack.

Content pollution propagation in the overlay network of peer‐to‐peer live streaming systems: modelling and analysis

“…In order to avoid high overhead of signing each packet with traditional asymmetric cryptographic protocol, Haridasan and van Renesse [32] grouped the hashes of a couple of packets into a special message, and have it signed by the source. However, Lin et al [33] believed that reputation system was a better solution than a cryptographic approach, which imposed significantly less computational and communication overhead. Regarding the communication overhead introduced by the hash values and the computational overhead imposed by the verification algorithm, Wang et al [34] designed a light‐weight non‐repudiation transmission protocol based on efficient one‐way hash function.…”

Dip

“…In Lin et al [2010] it is shown that a limited number of polluters can easily deteriorate the quality of a streaming application; a preliminary analysis of the possible defense mechanisms, whether based on cryptographic tools or reputation-based approaches, is presented in Lin et al [2010], as well. As opposed to our work in Lin et al [2010], a pull-based P2P streaming system without coding is used and the focus is more on the analysis of the effects of pollution in P2P streaming, whereas known techniques are evaluated as possible defenses.…”

Diagnosis of Content Pollution in P2P Live Streaming Networks

“…The authors conclude that the use of Merkle trees is one of the most efficient in terms of computational overhead. More recently, the authors of [18] have evaluated the impact of pollution attacks, and they show that the impact of an attack is not directly related to the network size, but is strongly depend on the network stability and on the bandwidth available by the malicious peers and by the source.…”

“…Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming video transmissions are becoming increasing popular in the Internet [18]. Several systems that implement video live streaming in P2P networks have appeared in last years, for instance PPLive 1 , SopCast 2 , and PPStream 3 .…”