Efficient User Authentication and Key Management for Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Systems

Recent development of the peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming technique has brought unprece-dented new momentum to the Internet with the characters of effective, scalable, and low cost. However, be-fore these applications can be successfully deployed as commercial applications, efficient access control mechanisms are needed. This work based on earlier research of the secure streaming architecture in Trust-Stream, analyzes how to ensure that only authorized users can access the original media in the P2P live streaming system by adopting a user authentication and key management scheme. The major features of this system include (1) the management server issues each authorized user a unique public key certificate,(2) the one-way hash chain extends the certificate's lifetime, (3) the original media is encrypted by the ses-sion key and delivered to the communication group, and (4) the session key is periodically updated and dis-tributed with the media. Finally, analyses and test results show that scheme provides a secure, scalable, re-liable, and efficient access control solution for P2P live streaming systems.