On the Feasibility of Moderating a Peer-to-Peer CDN System: A Proof-of-Concept Implementation

Content Delivery Network (CDN) Systems share many similarities with On-line Markets (OM), since they both provide a way to acquire something (be it information or a physical good) whose quality needs to be certified in order to provide consumer protection. In most common implementations the quality is guaranteed by a central node that provides moderation but also constitutes a bottleneck, a single point of failure and requires a significant amount of dedicated resources (both in hardware and in staffing). In this paper, we study the feasibility of a fully distributed, peer-to-peer based CDN system capable at the same time to provide quality guarantees about the content through well-defined, authenticated and enforced roles. We describe how to build such a structure leveraging bit-coin block-chains, cryptographic accumulators and the bit-torrent network, we describe a use case of such a structure to prove its usefulness, and finally we provide a proof-of-concept implementation.