Indexing and retrieval of multimedia metadata on a secure DHT

This paper proposes a decentralized, distributed and secure communication infrastructure for indexing and retrieving multimedia contents with associated digital rights. The lack of structured metadata describing the enormous amount of multimedia contents distributed on the the web leads to simple search mechanisms that usually are limited to queries by title or by author. Our approach is based on structured peer-to- peer networks and allows complex queries using standard MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 multimedia metadata. Moreover, security aspects limit the development of general purpose real applications using a peer-to- peer routing infrastructure for sharing digital items with an associated license. Accordingly, we propose a framework made up of a secure Distributed Hash Table layer based on Kademlia, including an identity based scheme and a secure communication protocol, providing an effective defense against well known attacks.