Secure Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Service in E-Commerce Environments

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) and service technology have been used in electronic commerce (e-commerce). To resolve network congestion and other problems in e-commerce applications, the e-commerce distribution systems based on the traditional paradigm are nowadays replaced by peer-to-peer systems that have a lot of advantages for e-commerce applications especially in digital content distribution field. Service technology can shield the heterogeneous platforms and is suitable for e-commerce applications. For these commerce applications, the security and P2P rights management become more and more urgent, and some new schemes and solutions are expected to function automatically or semi-automatically. In this paper, a secure digital content distribution scheme is presented, which can trace illegal distributors in P2P commerce applications. In this scheme, each decrypted media copy contains unique information that identifies the peer. The decryption operation and fingerprint embedding operation are combined together, which avoids the leakage of plain media content. Additionally, these operations are implemented by the peer, which makes the scheme compliant with existing P2P Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and very proper for P2P digital content distribution in e-commerce applications. As an example, the structure and payment mode of secure media distribution in e-commerce environment are presented and discussed.