A Survey on Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Legal Distribution of Copyrighted Multimedia Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a swift development in network structures like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. These P2P systems have some of the advantages that attract users to prefer its usage, such as making the setup running cost very small for the content provider to distribute original content and provide end users to access data within short time. But unfortunately, today¿s P2P content distribution systems are abused by illegal re-distributions. This illicit activity is not only worrisome for content providers but also for the end-users of these systems. The enforcement of copyright protection mechanisms in P2P content distribution systems poses serious privacy threats to end users, i.e. being monitored for each of their activities within these systems and being held accountable for copyright infringement. Various researchers have examined the challenges characterizing these systems from diverse viewpoints, proposing strategic solutions. This paper conducts a literature survey of various pertinent studies on the subject with the intention of describing the challenges and solutions that are associated with legal content distribution in P2P systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a review analysis focused on security, as well as on privacy and anonymity, is conducted.