Security and privacy issues in P2P streaming systems: A survey. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications (on-line 23

Streaming applications over Peer-To-Peer (P2P) sys-tems have gained an enormous popularity. Success al-ways implies increased concerns about security, pro-tection, privacy and all the other ‘side ’ properties that transform an experimental application into a service. Research on security for P2P streaming started to flour-ish, but no comprehensive security analysis over the current P2P solutions has yet been attempted. There are no best practices in system design, no (widely) accepted attack models, no measurement-based studies on secu-rity threats to P2P streaming, nor even general surveys investigating specific security aspects for these systems. This paper addresses this last aspect. Starting from existing analyses and security models in the literature, we give an overview on security and privacy considerations for P2P streaming systems. Our analysis emphasizes two major facts: i) the Byzantine – Altruistic – Rational (BAR) model offers stronger se-curity guarantees compared to other approaches, at the cost of higher complexity and overhead; and ii) the gen-eral perception (not necessarily the truth, but a com-monplace belief) that it is necessary to sacrifice accu-racy or performance in order to tolerate faults or misbe-haviors, is not always true