A secure peer-to-peer media distribution using blockchain technology

Abstract

As demand for online services has risen, video streaming services have scored a high share and bandwidth usage. A high proportion of these online services are users using smart devices to download and cache the streamed video segments. Collaborative video stream approaches have appeared, some of them are distributed among the internet, and others are using the wireless connection of the community to distribute the video segments. This thesis presents a method to distribute the video segments using a wireless connection to build a peer-to-peer network. It implements a method that describes the usage of Blockchain technology facilitates a secure and fast data transfer with the ability to detect and respond to malicious behaviors. Users can join and leave the network whenever they want, once the user joins the peer-to-peer network, previous streamed video segments owners will be shared with him by the Blockchain. The user can participate in the network by sharing his downloaded streamed segments to special nodes, these special nodes ensure the security of the method and are responsible for adding blocks to the blockchain. The thesis provides two layers of security, the first one is the blockchain itself which ensures the immutability and distribution of the data and the network contribution. The second layer is the Owner Hashed-Segments Table which helps to shared hashed segments among the nodes for validation and provides a dictionary of packets owners to ease request packets from their owners. It provides immutability and integrity to the segment. Inside the second layer, there is the Malware Tolerance Table which monitors the nodes for any malicious behavior and protects the system against Distributed Denial-of-service attacks. These are included inside the block of the blockchain and distributed to all nodes by the verifier nodes. These verifier nodes identities should be revealed and authenticated. \newpage A peer-to-peer network is constructed that consists of any smart devices. The smart devices represent the Nodes (peers) in the network. A special node called Verifier is responsible for the security measurements of the network, and responsible for adding blocks to the blockchain and distributing the blockchain among the nodes. A Node is going to connect to a streaming service or server to download video segments. Any node can join the network by Wifi without the need to connect to stream service or to have an internet connection. The block does not contain the segment itself but it contains the hash value of the segment, this value is fixed in size and a result of running the Message-Digest Algorithm function.