Author: Amna Qureshi
Programme: Doctoral Programme in Network and Information Technologies
Language: English
Supervisors: Dr David Megías Jiménez and Dr Helena Rifà Pous
Faculty / Institute: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Subjects: Computer Science
Key words: Privacy, Security, Anonymity, Peer-to-peer networks
Area of knowledge: Network and Information Technologies
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Summary
The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for multimedia distribution has spread globally in recent years. This mass popularity is primarily driven by the efficient distribution of content, also giving rise to piracy and copyright infringement and to privacy concerns. An end user (buyer) of a P2P content distribution system does not want to reveal his/her identity during a transaction with a content owner (merchant), whereas the merchant does not want the buyer to further re-distribute the content illegally. Therefore, there is a strong need for content distribution mechanisms over P2P networks that do not pose security and privacy threats to the copyright holders and end users respectively. However, the current systems that have been developed with the purpose of providing copyright and privacy protection to the merchant and end users employ cryptographic mechanisms incurring high computational and communicational burdens which make these systems impractical to distribute large sized files, such as music albums or movies.