Won't you be my neighbor?: neighbor selection attacks in mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming
Jeff Seibert, David Zage, Cristina Nita-Rotaru · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 2008
P2P streaming has grown in popularity, allowing people in many places to benefit from live audio and television services.Mesh-based P2P streaming has emerged as the predominant architecture in realworld use because of its resilience to chum and node failures, scalability, and ease of maintenance.The proliferation of these applications on the public Internet raises questions about how they can be deployed in a secure and robust manner.Failing to address security vulnerabilities could facilitate attacks with significant consequences such as content censorship, unfair business competition, or external impact on the Internet itself.In this paper, we identify and evaluate neighbor selection attacks against mesh-based P2P streaming which allow insider attackers to control the mesh overlay formation and maintenance.We demonstrate the effect of the attacks against a mesh-based P2P streaming system and propose a solution to mitigate the attacks.Our solution is scalable, has low overhead, and works in realistic heterogeneous networks.We evaluate our solution using a mesh-based P2P streaming system with real-world experiments on the PlanetLab Internet testbed and simulations using the OverSim P2P simulator.