Unauthorized copying of movies is a major concern for the motion picture industry. While unauthorized copies of movies have been distributed via portable physical media for some time, low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharing networks provide highly efficient distribution media. Many movies are showing up on file sharing networks shortly after, and in some cases prior to, theatrical release. It has been argued that the availability of unauthorized copies directly affects theater attendance and DVD sales, and hence represents a major financial threat to the movie industry. Our research attempts to determine the source of unauthorized copies by studying the availability and characteristics of recent popular movies in file sharing networks. We developed a data set of 312 popular movies and located one or more samples of 183 of these movies on file sharing networks, for a total of 285 movie samples. 77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders. Most of our samples appeared on file sharing networks prior to their official consumer DVD release date. Indeed, of the movies that had been released on DVD as of the time of our study, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks. We perform a brief analysis of the movie production and distribution process and identify potential security vulnerabilities that may lead to unauthorized copies becoming available to those who may wish to redistribute them. Finally, we offer recommendations for reducing security vulnerabilities in the movie production and distribution process.
Keywords: movies
Unauthorized copying of movies is a major concern for the motionpicture industry. While unauthorized copies of movies have beendistributed via portable physical media for some time, low-cost,high-bandwidth Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharingnetworks provide highly efficient distribution media. Many movies areshowing up on file sharing networks shortly after, and in some casesprior to, theatrical release. It has been argued that theavailability of unauthorized copies directly affects theaterattendance and DVD sales, and hence represents a major financialthreat to the movie industry. Our research attempts to determine thesource of unauthorized copies by studying the availability andcharacteristics of recent popular movies in file sharing networks. Ofthe 318 movie samples we examined, 79% appear to have been leakedby industry insiders. In addition, of the 209 unique movieswe acquired, 184 became available on the Internet prior to theirofficial consumer DVD release date. We perform a brief analysisof the movie production and distribution process and identifypotential security vulnerabilities that may lead to unauthorizedcopies becoming available to those who may wish to redistributethem. Finally, we offer recommendations for reducing securityvulnerabilities in the movie production and distribution process.
Keywords: movies
Keywords: games
Existing online multiplayer games typically use a client-server model, which introduces a single bottleneck and point of failure to the game. Distributed multiplayer games remove the bottleneck, but require special synchronization mechanisms to provide a consistent game for all players. Current synchronization methods have been borrowed from distributed military simulations and are not optimized for the requirements of fast-paced multiplayer games. In this paper we present a new synchronization mechanism, trailing state synchronization (TSS), which is designed around the requirements of distributed first-person shooter games.We look at TSS in the environment of a mirrored game architecture, which is a hybrid between traditional centralized architectures and the more scalable peer-to-peer architectures. Mirrored architectures allow for improved performance compared to client-server architectures while at the same time allowing for a greater degree of centralized administration than peer-to-peer architectures.
Keywords: games
Existing online multiplayer games typically use a client-server model,which introduces added latency as well as a single bottleneck and singlepoint of failure to the game. Distributed multiplayer games minimizelatency and remove the bottleneck, but requirespecial synchronization mechanisms to provide a consistent game forall players. Current synchronization methods have been borrowed fromdistributed military simulations and are not optimized for therequirements of fast-paced multiplayer games. In this paper we presenta new synchronization mechanism, trailing statesynchronization (TSS), which is designed around the requirements ofdistributed first-person shooter games.We look at TSS in the environment of a mirrored gamearchitecture, which is a hybrid between traditional centralizedarchitectures and the more scalable peer-to-peer architectures.Mirrored architectures allow for improved performance compared toclient-server architectures while at the same time allowing for agreater degree of centralized administration than peer-to-peerarchitectures.
We evaluate the performance of TSS and other synchronization methodsthrough simulation and examine heuristics for selecting thesynchronization delays needed for TSS.
Keywords: games
Web content providers and content distribution network (CDN) operators often set up mirrors of popular content to improve performance. Due to the scale and decentralized administration of the Internet, companies have a limited number of sites (relative to the size of the Internet) where they can place mirrors. We formalize the mirror placement problem as a case of constrained mirror placement, where mirrors can only be placed on a preselected set of candidates. We study performance improvement in terms of client round-trip time (RTT) and server load when clients are clustered by the autonomous systems (AS) in which they reside. Our results show that, regardless of the mirror placement algorithm used, for only a surprisingly small range of values is increasing the number of mirror sites (under the constraint) effective in reducing client to server RTT and server load. In this range, we show that greedy placement performs the best.
Keywords: idmaps
Forward-secure signatures (FSSs) have recently received muchattention from the cryptographic theory community as a potentiallyrealistic way to mitigate many of the difficulties digitalsignatures face with key exposure. However, no previous works haveexplored the practical performance of these proposed constructionsin real-world applications, nor have they compared FSS totraditional, non-forward-secure, signatures in a non-asymptotic way.We present an empirical evaluation of several FSS schemes that looksat the relative performance among different types of FSS as well asbetween FSS and traditional signatures. Our study provides thefollowing contributions: first, a new methodology for comparing theperformance of signature schemes, and second, a thorough examinationof the practical performance of FSS. We show that for many casesthe best FSS scheme has essentially identical performance totraditional schemes, and even in the worst case is only 2-4 timesslower. On the other hand, we also show that if the wrong FSSconfiguration is used, the performance can be orders of magnitudeslower. Our methodology provides a way to prevent suchmisconfigurations, and we examine common applications of digitalsignatures using it.
We conclude that not only are forward-secure signatures a usefultheoretical construct as previous works have shown, but they arealso, when used correctly, a very practical solution to some of theproblems associated with key exposure in real-world applications.Through our metrics and our reference implementation we provide thetools necessary for developers to efficiently use FSS.
Keywords: security
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