Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Legal Distribution of Copyrighted Multimedia Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Brief Overview

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a swift development in network structures like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems, offering advantages such as significantly reducing the setup running cost for the content providers and providing end users data access within very short time. However, today¿s P2P distribution systems are severely abused by illegal re-distributions. The enforcement of copyright protection mechanisms in these systems poses serious privacy threats to end users. Various researchers have examined the challenges characterizing these systems from diverse viewpoints, proposing strategic solutions. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time conducts a review analysis focused on security, privacy and anonymity in P2P systems, describing the challenges and solutions that are associated with legal content distribution in them.