946 research outputs found
An Analysis of BitTorrent Cross-Swarm Peer Participation and Geolocational Distribution
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent
years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes
per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet
traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest
BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the
most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering
exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational
levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount
of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related
information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were
collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the
total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of
the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results
presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and
future network design.Comment: The First International Workshop on Hot Topics in Big Data and
Networking (HotData I
One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users
Tor is a popular low-latency anonymity network. However, Tor does not protect
against the exploitation of an insecure application to reveal the IP address
of, or trace, a TCP stream. In addition, because of the linkability of Tor
streams sent together over a single circuit, tracing one stream sent over a
circuit traces them all. Surprisingly, it is unknown whether this linkability
allows in practice to trace a significant number of streams originating from
secure (i.e., proxied) applications. In this paper, we show that linkability
allows us to trace 193% of additional streams, including 27% of HTTP streams
possibly originating from "secure" browsers. In particular, we traced 9% of Tor
streams carried by our instrumented exit nodes. Using BitTorrent as the
insecure application, we design two attacks tracing BitTorrent users on Tor. We
run these attacks in the wild for 23 days and reveal 10,000 IP addresses of Tor
users. Using these IP addresses, we then profile not only the BitTorrent
downloads but also the websites visited per country of origin of Tor users. We
show that BitTorrent users on Tor are over-represented in some countries as
compared to BitTorrent users outside of Tor. By analyzing the type of content
downloaded, we then explain the observed behaviors by the higher concentration
of pornographic content downloaded at the scale of a country. Finally, we
present results suggesting the existence of an underground BitTorrent ecosystem
on Tor
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