This Master thesis is a contribution to develope Multimedia security mechanisms for various P2P file sharing environments. Objective of this research thesis is to design a software tool for Multimedia business environments to fight against the copyright infringement in various P2P file sharing networks. In order to fulfil this objective, a combined implementation of two independent mechanisms designed at Fraunhofer IPSI is required. So far, the combined implementation does not yet exist for any P2P network. So, the first objective is to design a most comprehensive architecture for their implementation and the second objective is to validate that implementation built on top of the architecture. To do so, we have chosen BitTorrent network for implementation and validation.
The main objective of this research thesis work is to design a software tool for identifying copyright violated works in various P2P networks. In fact, P2P networks are the prominent networks for such copyright violations. To do so, a combined implementation of two independent mechanisms described in chapter 2 is required. This combined implementation prior to this thesis work had not existed in the form of a concrete software tool. So, the first objective is to design a most comprehensive architecture for their implementation and the second objective is to validate that implementation built on our architecture. Hence we have chosen BitTorrent network for implementation and validation. The mechanisms we addressed in our implementation are: Passive Mechanism: Digital Watermarking is the passive mechanism which is used to add information to multimedia files to be protected. This active part is just used to achieve our goal but not focused in validation because of the reason mentioned in the 1.4 section Active Search Mechanism: In order to fight against illegal copies an active search mechanism scanning for potential copyright violations is needed. Any P2P network implementation must maintain this framework extendable to other P2P networks. This is the area focused in validation phase.