P3LS: Plausible deniability for practical privacy-preserving live streaming

Video consumption is one of the most popular Internet activities worldwide. The emergence of sharing videos directly recorded with smartphones raises important privacy concerns. In this paper we propose P3LS, the first practical privacy-preserving peer-to-peer live streaming system. To protect the privacy of its users, P3LS relies on k-anonymity when users subscribe to streams, and on plausible deniability for the dissemination of video streams. Specifically, plausible deniability during the dissemination phase ensures that an adversary is never able to distinguish a user's stream of interest from the fake streams from a statistical analysis (i.e., using an analysis of variance). We exhaustively evaluate P3LS and show that adversaries are not able to identify the real stream of a user with very high confidence. Moreover, P3LS consumes 30% less bandwidth than the standard k-anonymity approach where nodes fully contribute to the dissemination of k streams.