A design for securing data delivery in mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming

While mesh-based approaches have emerged as the dominant architecture for P2P streaming, the performance of these approaches under malicious participants has received little attention. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of the implicit commitments made by nodes when peering with others. We show that when these commitments are not enforced explicitly, they can be exploited by malicious nodes to conduct attacks that degrade the data delivery service. We consider mesh-based specific P2P attacks where malicious nodes deliberately become neighbors of a large number of nodes and do not upload data to them, or malicious nodes deliberately delay packets till they are not useful anymore for the application. We focus on these attacks given the limited attention paid to them, and the significant impact they can have on overall data delivery. We present mechanisms that can enhance the resilience of mesh-based streaming against such attacks. A key part of our solution is a novel reputation scheme that combines feedback from both the control and data planes of the overlay. We evaluate our design with real-world experiments on the PlanetLab testbed and show that our design is effective. Even when there are 30% attackers, nodes receive 92% of the data with our schemes, however without our schemes they only receive 10% of the data. (C) 2011 Elsevier BM. All rights reserved.