Design of a Secure Digital Contents Delivery System in P2P Networks

Abstract

The growth of the Internet has created an electronic marketplace for digital goods, such as mp3, software, etc., and peer-to-peer(P2P) networks for distribution and sharing of files have enjoyed enormous popularity in recent. However, there is an essential problem related with trustiness and reliability in P2P, where untrustworthy parties may participate in financial transactions. One general solution to this problem is distributing the encrypted version of digital content so that a legitimate user can get the decryption key from key issuing server. In this paper, we propose a new approach to key issuing for designing a secure content distribution system. Each user can recovery the original digital content from the encrypted version of it by purchasing decryption key from key issuing server. However, instead of generating a random key, the key used for content encryption and decryption can be directly derived from the usage rules or transaction terms in our system. This approach allows to separate content encrypter and key issuer, and then it also enables to remove the need of secure key transfer between content provider and key issuing server in secure content distribution system.