Security Issues In Bittorrent Like P2P Streaming Systems

We present a streaming protocol that addresses the security issues pertaining to BitTorrent like P2P systems. Any efficient streaming system would not be effective if it cannot withstand security threats. We focus on free rider\u27s, whitewasher\u27s and malicious payload insertion attacks which implicitly affect Quality of Service like important metrics for the streaming system. We propose a novel idea of alliance formation, wherein the nodes collaborate with their preferred participating peers for a symbiotic association. The protocol enforces a strict policy that dissuades free riders and whitewashers from their selfish behavior. We propose a lightweight integrity checking algorithm for malicious garbled payload insertion to guard against security threats to the swarm. We present an evaluative comparison of the system performance in a cheating node free environment versus system with prevalent threats. Our simulation results show that cheating and malicious node problem can be significantly reduced by our proposed protocol. We explore the security vulnerabilities in the contemporary p2p file sharing systems and make security recommendations for the same