Mistrustful P2P: Deterministic privacy-preserving P2P file sharing model to hide user content interests in untrusted peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

P2P networks endowed individuals with the means to easily and efficiently distribute digital media over the Internet, but user legal liability issues may be raised as they also facilitate the unauthorized distribution and reproduction of copyrighted material. Traditional P2P file sharing systems focus on performance and scalability, disregarding any privacy or legal issues that may arise from their use. Lacking alternatives, and unaware of the privacy issues that arise from relaying traffic of insecure applications, users have adopted anonymity systems for P2P file sharing. This work aims at hiding user content interests from malicious peers through plausible deniability. The Mistrustful P2P model is built on the concept of mistrusting all the entities participating in the P2P network, hence its name. It provides a deterministic and configurable privacy protection that relies on cover content downloads to hide user content interests, has no trust requirements, and introduces several mechanisms to prevent user legal liability and reduce network overhead while enabling timely content downloads. We extend previous work on the Mistrustful P2P model by discussing its legal and ethical framework, assessing its feasibility for more use cases, providing a security analysis, comparing it against a traditional P2P file sharing model, and further defining and improving its main mechanisms.