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

Abstract

In the past few years, peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming systems have gained great commercial success and have become a popular way to deliver multimedia content over the Internet, which received more and more attentions from both industry and academia globally. However, the dramatic rise in popularity makes these systems more likely to be vulnerable targets. In this study, mesh-pull infrastructure architecture and pollution attack principle for P2P live streaming systems were presented firstly, and then the various user behaviours under the pollution attack were analysed. Subsequently, the authors proposed an analytical modelling framework of content pollution attack for P2P live streaming systems. Different from the existing content pollution propagation models, it considers the impact of user behaviours in the attack. Furthermore, to ensure the availability and accuracy of the model, the real-world experimental attack data for a popular commercial system was used to verify it. The results showed that the model is a feasible and efficient tool to analyse and predict content pollution propagation in real-world P2P live streaming systems. The authors' work can provide an in-depth understanding of the content pollution propagation in P2P live streaming systems, and evaluation of restraining illegal content distribution for copyright holders and government.