On Pollution Attacks in Fully Connected P2P Networks Using Trusted Peers

This work studies the impact of the pollution attack in a fully connected live video streaming P2P push based overlay network, as well as the effectiveness of using trusted peers as the only defense mechanism. Determining the best strategies for both: i) trusted peers (TPs) with the aim to detect and expel malicious peers (MPs) and ii) malicious peers in order to pollute without being detected, is a challenge. Preliminary experimental results for the studied strategies show that the use of TPs is not an enough solution to defeat a large number of MPs because the number of TPs should be at least equal to the number of MPs. Additionally, this study shows the ingredients of a possible game theory problem formulation where the proposed attacker strategy could be improved to detect TPs, which in turn could improve the defense strategy, and so on.