Flexible Verification of MPEG-4 Stream in Peer-to-Peer CDN

The current packet based stream authentication schemes provide effective and efficient authentication over a group of packets transmitted on erasure channels. However, by fixing the packets in transmission, any packet manipulation will cause authentication failure. In p2p content delivery network where a proxy-in-the-middle is able to store, forward, transcode and transform the stream, previous schemes are simply unapplicable. To address the problem, we propose a flexible verification scheme that relies on special stream formats (i.e. Unequal Loss Protection ULP scheme [7]). We apply the so called Unequal Loss Verification ULV scheme into MPEG-4 framework. The encoding, packing, amortizing and verifying methods are elaborated in this paper. Our analysis shows that the scheme is secure and cost effective. The scheme is indeed content aware and ensures the verification rate intuitively reflecting a meaningful stream. Further on, we describe the general method of publishing and retrieving a stream in p2p CDN.