Understanding pollution dynamics in large-scale peer-to-peer IPTV system

Abstract

With the great commercial success of several IPTV (internet protocal television) applications, PPLive has received more and more attention from both industry and academia. At present, PPLive system is one of the most popular instances of IPTV applications which attract a large number of users across the globe; however, the dramatic rise in popularity makes it more likely to become a vulnerable target. The main contribution of this work is twofold. Firstly, a dedicated distributed crawler system was proposed and its crawling performance was analyzed, which was used to evaluate the impact of pollution attack in P2P live streaming system. The measurement results reveal that the crawler system with distributed architecture could capture PPLive overlay snapshots with more efficient way than previous crawlers. To the best of our knowledge, our study work is the first to employ distributed architecture idea to design crawler system and discuss the crawling performance of capturing accurate overlay snapshots for P2P live streaming system. Secondly, a feasible and effective pollution architecture was proposed to deploy content pollution attack in a real-world P2P live streaming system called PPLive, and deeply evaluate the impact of pollution attack from following five aspects: dynamic evolution of participating users, user lifetime characteristics, user connectivity-performance, dynamic evolution of uploading polluted chunks and dynamic evolution of pollution ratio. Specifically, the experiment results show that a single polluter is capable of compromising all the system and its destructiveness is severe.