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Peer-to-peer content distribution networks can suf-fer from malicious participants that corrupt content. Current systems verify blocks with traditional cryptographic signatures and hashes. However, these techniques do not apply well to more elegant schemes that use network coding techniques for efficient content distribution.

Architectures that use network coding are prone to jamming attacks where the introduction of a few corrupted blocks can quickly result in a large number of bad blocks propagating through the system. Identifying such bogus blocks is difficult and requires the use of homomorphic hashing functions, which are computationally expensive.