Xiaosong Lou (University of Southern California), “Peer-to-peer content networking with copyright protection and jitter-free streaming”, Advisor: Kai Hwang, 2009 P2P video streaming system has become popular among Internet users in recent years. This thesis studies two critical issues and proposes new solutions to P2P content distribution: copyright protection and jitter-free streaming. Studies show that playback jitter is one of the most important indications of the Quality of Service in P2P video streaming systems. This thesis presents a queuing model applicable to general online video streaming and derives a lower bound of jitter-free probability. Applying this model in P2P network architecture leads to a design methodology for P2P video streaming systems with high jitter-free probability. Content poisoning is normally treated as a security threat, but some researchers and commercial efforts have attempted to use it against P2P piracy with mixed results. This thesis proves that the underlying chunking schemes and hashing mechanisms ultimately determine the effect of content poisoning. A proactive content poisoning scheme using identity-based signature is proposed. This scheme selectively targets content poisoning to pirates while legitimate peers are unaffected. Furthermore, the proposed P2P network design for copyrighted content distribution is also highly resistant to index poisoning attacks. For details, click here or contact the author.