Polluted content prevention in Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, file sharing application is popular among internet users due to its high scalability and anonymity. The increasing number of polluted or infected contents shared in the network leads to the wastage of peers´ time, bandwidth, and other resources. In this paper, a model is proposed to identify and prevent the polluted or infected content propagation in the P2P network. The model allows only the authenticated peers in the initial file sharing stage until the files are found to be genuine and good quality. Once the shared file is accepted by the authenticated peers for further sharing, the file is opened for public or anonymous users. The advantage of this model is that it can be deployed easily in BitTorrent-like P2P networks. Simulation results show that the proposed model helps in overcoming the problems of bandwidth wastage and initial time flash crowd. It is also proved that the model effectively eliminates the polluted contents from the P2P file sharing network and prevents their propagation to a large number of peers. Comparison between the performance of the proposed model and BitTorrent simulation shows that our model performs well in the event of sharing any polluted or infected contents in the P2P network.