The biometric signature delegation scheme to balance the load of digital signing in hybrid P2P networks

Abstract

With the wide spread use of smart phones and high-speed networks, the demands for video contents are growing rapidly, for which broad bandwidth is needed. Generally, the client–server model is used to stream video contents to customers. The downside is that the server can be overloaded if the traffic is converged to popular content. In P2P protocol, the client can act as a server, thus the load of the server can be distributed. But, P2P protocol cannot discriminate whether seeders have legal rights of distribution of paid contents. Thus, unsubscribed users can access and play the paid contents. There are too many seeders to apply the server policies, and the seeders are able to join or leave the network autonomically. Thus, for contents business, a hybrid P2P model seems to be best to apply by allowing the index server for management and the seeders for contents distribution. It’s necessary to use PKI certificates to authenticate the seeders to bind them to have legal right of distribution. However, in this case, if seeders are growing rapidly, the work load of PKI authentication may be increased too. The PKI is a static structure where trustful CAs are made by government policy. It’s not easy to reflect the status of dynamic seeder groups, the number of seeders whom the PKI authentication needed is unpredictable and the process of certificate based signing is complex. In addition, the seeder who has not certificate cannot participate in contents distribution. Biometric based signing can replace the role of PKI based signing, as the biometric key is only bound to a specific person, thus the key itself has legal binding forces. We focus on how to stream video contents with safety and efficiency in the hybrid P2P model. Firstly, only subscribed users should be able to join the contents sharing, and the sales and delivery transactions are to be operated with different protocols. Secondly, the distributed authentication is needed to alleviate the work load of signing seeders responsible for contents distribution. Thus, to decrease the traffic converged to the PKI server, in a hybrid P2P based business model, it’s preferable to apply PKI based signing to the seller, and biometric based signing to the seeders. The index server should be able to control the sales and delivery transactions in a static manner, and the seeders should be dynamically grouped and managed. If the trust relationship from the index server to the seeder is established, the trust chain, the delegate signature could be legally accepted. In this study, we propose the biometric signature delegation scheme. The proposed scheme consists of a biometric key generation, signature delegation, signature generation and verification protocols. We also show how our scheme could be applied to distribute the contents in a hybrid P2P networks.