Abstract
In comparison with conventional content delivery networks, peer-to-peer (p2p) content delivery is promising to save cost and handle high peak-demand, and can also complement the decentralized storage networks such as Filecoin. However, reliable p2p delivery requires proper enforcement of delivery fairness, i.e., the deliverers should be rewarded according to their in-time delivery. Unfortunately, most existing studies on delivery fairness are based on non-cooperative game-theoretic assumptions that are arguably unrealistic in the ad-hoc p2p setting.
We for the first time put forth an expressive yet still minimalist security notion for desired fair p2p content delivery, and give two efficient solutions \(\mathsf {FairDownload}\) and \(\mathsf {FairStream}\) via the blockchain for p2p downloading and p2p streaming scenarios, respectively. Our designs not only guarantee delivery fairness to ensure deliverers be paid (nearly) proportional to their in-time delivery but also ensure the content consumers and content providers are fairly treated. The fairness of each party can be guaranteed when the other two parties collude to arbitrarily misbehave. Moreover, the systems are efficient in the sense of attaining nearly asymptotically optimal on-chain costs and deliverer communication.
We implement the protocols and build the prototype systems atop the Ethereum Ropsten network. Extensive experiments done in LAN and WAN settings showcase their high practicality.
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Notes
- 1.
More thorough discussions about the insufficiencies of some pertinent studies (including gradual-release based fair exchange [7, 10], blockchain-based fair exchange/MPC [6, 9, 12, 25, 31], fair off-chain payment channels [11, 33], and some known decentralized content delivery schemes [2, 19]) are provided in the online full version [21].
- 2.
Code availability: https://github.com/Blockchain-World/FairThunder.git.
- 3.
To defend against replay attack in concurrent sessions, it is trivial to let the authenticated messages include a session id sid field, which, for example, can be instantiated by the hash of the transferred data identifier \(\mathsf {root}_m\), the involved parties’ addresses and an increasing-only nonce, namely \(sid := \mathcal {H}(\mathsf {root}_m||\mathcal {V}\_address||pk_{\mathcal {S}}||pk_{\mathcal {R}}||nonce)\).
- 4.
Remark that the content m is dividable in the sense that each chunk is independent to other chunks, e.g., the chunk is a small 10-s video fragment.
- 5.
Throughout this paper, we consider \(\phi \) is in the form of \(\phi (m) = [\mathsf {root}(\mathsf {BuildMT}(m)) \equiv \mathsf {root}_m]\), where \(\mathsf {root}\) is the Merkle tree root of m. In practice, it can be acquired from a semi-trusted third party, e.g., VirusTotal [23] or BitTorrent forum sites [28].
- 6.
\(\mathcal {P}\) can retrieve the deposits of
and
back if no deliverers respond timely. - 7.
W.l.o.g., we assume \(n = 2 ^ k\) for \(k \in \mathbb {Z}\) for presentation simplicity.
- 8.
can be required proportional to
in case \(\mathcal {P}\) deliberately lowers it. - 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
The experimental configuration details are described in the full version [21].
and
back if no deliverers respond timely.
can be required proportional to
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Acknowledgements
Yuan Lu is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62102404). This work was also supported in part by NSF #1801492 and FHWA 693JJ320C000021. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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He, S., Lu, Y., Tang, Q., Wang, G., Wu, C.Q. (2021). Fair Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery via Blockchain. In: Bertino, E., Shulman, H., Waidner, M. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2021. ESORICS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88418-5_17
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