Securing Peer-to-Peer Content Sharing Service from Poisoning Attacks

Abstract

Poisoning attacks in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content sharing service have become a serious security problem on the global Internet due to the features of P2P systems such as self-organization, self-maintenance, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel poisoning-resistant security framework based on the notion that the content providers would be the only trusted sources to verify the integrity of the requested content. To provide the mechanisms of availability and scalability, a content provider publishes the information of his shared contents to a group of content maintainers self-organized in a security overlay, so that a content requestor can verify the integrity of the requested content from the associated content maintainers. Two defense functions are first carried out - filtering out malicious activities and selecting the authentic content version. Then, the content requestor can perform the content integrity verification while downloading and take prompt protection actions to handle content poisoning attacks. To further enhance the system performance, we devise a scalable probabilistic verification scheme. The evaluation results illustrate that our framework can effectively and efficiently defend against content poisoning in various scenarios.