SAMcast - A Scalable, Secure and Authenticated Multicast Protocol for Large Scale P2P Networks

Overlay networks have shown tremendous potential in solving large scale data dissemination problem by employing peer-to-peer communication protocols. These networks, however, have mostly been used for illegal dissemination of copyrighted material. This paper is aimed at investigating an incentive driven approach to encourage users to actively participate in overlay activities. The users are also discouraged from indulging in illegal distribution of copyrighted material by employing an efficient public key based broadcast encryption scheme along with a deterministic traitor tracing mechanism. We note that public key based broadcast encryption schemes require some mechanism by which a peer can verify the integrity of contents downloaded from other peers. SAMcast is the first protocol, to the best of our knowledge, which provides an efficient integrity verification mechanism along with public key based broadcast encryption. Our experiment results show that the proposed broadcast encryption scheme is highly scalable and the integrity verification is extremely efficient both in terms of computation and communication.